American Tour de Sol Reports, 1995 Sponsored by The AutoAuditorium System from Foveal Systems A Fully Automatic, Multi-Camera System that Produces Videos Without a Crew http://www.AutoAuditorium.com - - - - - - - - - The following are copyright Michael H. Bianchi. Permission to copy is granted provided each Report is presented without modification and this notice is attached. For other arrangements, contact me at +1-973-822-2024 . For more on the NESEA Tour de Sol, see the web page at http://www.nesea.org Official NESEA Tour de Sol information is available from the sponsor, the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) at 413 774-6051 , and 50 Miles Street, Greenfield, MA 01301 , and nesea@nesea.org . All media enquiries should be addressed to ... Jack Groh Groh Associates email: GrohPR@aol.com 401 732-1551 telephone 401 732-0547 fax 401 952-0886 cell/pager - - - - - - - - - American Tour de Sol coming in May This is my first post on the American Tour de Sol (ATdS) which runs from May 20, 1995, until May 27th. The race is a Road Rally Championship for Electric and Solar Cars (according to the logo) and is actually 5 races in one. The 5 categories are: Production Vehicles sold or leased as turn-key items American Commuter Vehicles which carry two people with performance suitable for carpooling Mass Transit Buses! Solar Racing These get all their energy from the sun Open Everything else, including hybrids, motorcycles, etc. Entrants range from automobile manufacturers and converters to colleges, high schools, junior high schools, elementary schools(!) and individuals. You'll see conversions and purpose-built transportation of many types. If you want to see EVs in almost every possible variation, this is the place to be. The race is less about speed and more about efficiency, and is conducted on an open course; the cars travel on the highways, in the traffic, following (and sometimes breaking?) the normal rules of the road. Real cars carrying real people from and to real places. The public-is-invited parts of the schedule are ... Saturday, May 20 Library Park, Waterbury CT noon - 5pm Waterbury Solarbration and ATdS display Sunday, May 20 Library Park, Waterbury CT noon - 5pm Waterbury Solarbration and ATdS display Monday, May 22 Waterbury CT to Northampton MA 8am - 1pm display, Grand Street, Waterbury CT 12:30 - 1pm ATdS starting ceremonies 2:30 - 6:30 display, Smith Vocational High School, Northampton MA Tuesday, May 23 Northampton MA to Greenfield MA to Brattleboro VT 8am - 10am display and restart, Smith Vocational High School, Northampton MA 10:30 - 1pm display, Miles Street, Greenfield MA 1:30 - 6pm display, Brattleboro Union High School, Brattleboro VT Wednesday, May 24 Jaffrey NH to Lexington MA 8am - 10am display and restart, Mt Monadnock State Park, Jaffrey NH 11:30 - 7pm display, Minuteman Science and Technology High School, Lexington MA Thursday, May 25 Lexington MA to Dover NH (Exeter lunch may be added) 8am - 10am display and restart, Minuteman Science and Technology High School, Lexington MA 11:30 - 6:30 display, Dover NH Friday, May 26 Dover NH to Portland ME 8am - 10am display and restart, Dover NH 11:30 - 5:30 display, Monument Square, Portland ME Saturday, May 27 Portland ME 9:30 - 4:30 display, Maine Solar Blast, downtown Portland ME Autocross, Electrathon, Junior Solar Sprints and more If you would like to volunteer to help at any of these stops, call the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) at 413 774-6051. I'm sure they'll be glad to hear from you. I intend to travel with the race the entire way, and post to this group: Race progress and standings Interviews with the participants and organizers Personal opinions and insights as I did last year. I'll post new schedule information as I get it. Mike Bianchi This information is from NESEA's February ATdS News, and is subject to change and my typos. Official information is whatever NESEA says it is. American Tour de Sol categories This is my second post on the American Tour de Sol (ATdS) which runs from May 20, 1995, until May 27th. The race is a Road Rally Championship for Electric and Solar Cars (according to the logo) and is actually 5 races in one. The 5 categories are (quoting from the ATdS Quick Facts sheet): Production An electric or solar assisted electric vehicle that is for sale, and is being driven as it will be sold. Five, essentially identical vehicles, must have been sold prior to the race. Motorcycles, sedans, utility vehicles, and mass transit vehicles may enter. Discovery Channel Commuter A practical two or more seater electric or solar assisted electric vehicle. Conversions and purpose-built sedans, trucks and vans may enter. There are no restrictions on the energy storage system, which may be batteries, fuel cells, or flywheels. Hybrid Vehicles which use an electric motor as well as some other liquid or gaseous fuel used in a generator or fuel cell, or use a flywheel. Solar Racing One person solar electric vehicle that can travel at regular road speeds (25-60 mph). Tour de Sol and Sunrayce vehicles may enter. Grid charging is permitted, but a severe penalty will be levied. Open Vehicles that conform to the aims of the event but do not fall into any of the above categories. These vehicles might be two wheeled vehicles such as mopeds and motorcycles, open-person electric vehicles, or hybrid electric vehicles, which use solar electric, or solar thermal, as well as some other fuel combined with an electric drive system. Prizes are awarded for: Best Performance, by category, by vehicle size, and energy storage system. Efficiency, calculated as miles per kiloWatt-hour (kWh). Range, greatest distance traveled in a single day without "refueling". NESEA Energy Challenge, acknowledging the least energy used to travel down the road, measured from "the well to the wheels", computed as equivalent miles per gallon. Student-built (in the American Commuter and Open categories), presented by the US Department of Energy (Argonne National Laboratory). The standing records for the Efficiency prizes are: 5.6 miles/kWh Utility vehicle: Ford "Ecostar" 11 miles/kWh Sedan: Solectria "Force RS" 26 miles/kWh Purpose built: MIT "Aztec" 26 miles/kWh Two wheeler: Schiller Group's "CityCat" 41 miles/kWh 3-wheel/Open category Team New England's "TNE II" The standing Range records are: 142 miles with lead-acid batteries: Bolton High School "Solar Bolt" 189 miles in Production car: Ford "Ecostar" 214 miles American Commuter, advanced storage: Solectria "Force RS" using Ovonics nickel metal hydride batteries Of particular interest to the EV discussion e-mail group is the Solar Bolt. They achieved that 142 miles per charge record using 120V of Trojan batteries (27 kWh), Advanced DC motor, and Curtis controller in a 1974 Fiat. (Sound familiar?) They did this by getting the coefficient of drag down to 0.3 by smoothing out the car's lines, keeping the air away from the underside of the car with a front dam, reducing the frontal area, using low rolling resistance, tubed tires, reworking the disk brakes calipers to make the pistons >perfectly< round, and making the wheel camber > dead zero <. All this was to get rid of every bit of friction they could find. The result is a 3394 pound car that can be moved with one finger! Pretty impressive, even if you don't notice that this is a > high school < team. ((This from a talk given by Roger Titus of Bolton High School at the 1994 NESEA Sustainable Energy Conference.)) Bolton is entered in the 1995 ATdS. Speaking of ATdS entries, I'm told that the Solectria "Sunrise", that all- composite EV announced at EVS-12 in December, is also scheduled to be in the American Commuter category. Apparently, even the suspension springs are made of composites!? And a US Electricar Bus is in the Production category. And included with the Hybrid cars are entries from Cornell University and Mt Everett High School. And I'm told they also have one entry from Germany and two from Japan registered as of this date. More as we get closer to the race. If you would like to volunteer to help at the race, call the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) at 413 774-6051. I'm sure they'll be glad to hear from you. Mike Bianchi American Tour de Sol, car list According to the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA), sponsor of the American Tour de Sol, as of April 21, 1995, the list of entrants is (subject to my typos): RACE CATEGORY NUMBER NAME TEAM NAME TOWN STATE CAR TYPE / BATTERY MFG / CHEMISTRY Production Category #50 sedan CT EV Project/EWS Hartford CT sedan to-be-announced #51 '95 Solectria Force CT EV Project/EWS Hartford CT 1995 Solectria Force / SAFT / Nickel Cadmium #7 Nordic Challenger EVermont Waterbury VT 1994 Solectria Force / Sonnenschein / lead acid #54 US Electricar Bus New England Power Service Westboro MA US Electricar Bus / / lead acid #55 Ford Ecostar Northeast Utilities Hartford CT Ford Ecostar van / ABB / Sodium Sulphur Discovery Channel Commuter Category #60 Millenium Falcon Blue Sky Club Greenwich CT VW sedan / Trojan / lead acid #61 Solar Bolt Bolton High School Bolton CT 1974 Fiat sedan / Trojan / lead acid #62 Solectria Force Boston Edison Electric Boston MA Solectria Force (Geo Metro) / Electrosource; Horizon / advanced lead acid #63 Solectria Sunrise Boston Edison Electric Boston MA pre-production prototype / Ovonic / Nickel Metal Hydride #64 Kineticar II CSERT-NVCTC Waterbury CT Chevy S-10 pick-up / Trojan / lead acid #65 Electric Hare Falmouth Wattsmen Falmouth ME VW Rabbit / US Battery / lead acid #66 Genesis I Genesis Team Saginaw MI Dodge D-50 pick-up / Trojan / lead acid #67 Zee Vee 88 GLEAA & GLEAN Westerville OH / / lead acid #68 Solar Flair I Greenwich Solar Flair Greenwich CT VW Rabbit / Trojan / lead acid #71 S-15 Truck Minuteman Science-Technology Lexington MA S-15 truck / Trojan / lead acid #72 Sungo NHTI Solar Car Team Concord NH purpose-built 2-seater / Sears / lead acid #73 Electric Fiero Orr Electric Racing Team Cincinnati OH Fiero / GNB / lead acid #74 Lightning Volt Parkland HS / Lehigh Co VTS Orefield PA S-10 truck / Trojan / lead acid #75 KA1000 Polytech Chargers Farmingdale NY / Trojan / lead acid #76 RHAM Rod RHAM Science & Tech. Hebron CT 1985 Nissan Pulsar / Trojan / lead acid #77 Dalliance So. Maine Technical College So. Portland ME Renault / / lead acid #78 Sofix Sedan Sofix Design Nagoya Japan Nissan / / #79 1958 Berkeley Team New England Nahant MA 58 Berkeley roadster / / #80 Brock Electruck Thousand Islands Sec. School Brockville, GMC Truck / / Ontario Canada #69 Commuter Villanova University Villanova PA VW Beetle + / Exide / lead acid #81 Sparky Wooster's Charge Danbury CT Saab sedan / Trojan / lead acid #82 Grey Ghost Yankee Ingenuity Marlborough CT '29 Mercedes replica / GNB / lead acid Solar Racing Category #83 Sol Survivor III ConVal Solar Racing Team Dublin NH Tour de Sol racer / GNB / lead acid #98 Solar Flyer FHS Solar Car Team Framingham MA Tour de Sol racer / Sears gel cell / lead acid #84 Suntech NHTI Solar Car Team Concord NH Tour de Sol racer / Trojan / lead acid #37 Ottawa Orange II OHHS Tech Prep Race Team Grand Rapids MI Cross Continental racer / Exide / lead acid #85 Photon Salisbury School Salisbury CT Tour de Sol racer / Sears / lead acid #28 TNE II Team New England Nahant MA Solar Racing / Exide / lead acid #87 Spirit of Massachusetts Univ. of Mass. Lowell Lowell MA Cross Continental racer / US Battery / lead acid #88 Mach .05, UVM UVM Mach .05 Racing Team Burlington VT Tour de Sol / Interstate / lead acid Open Hybrid Category #3 Tempest Cornell HEV Ithica NY 2-person purpose built / / lead acid + CNG Geo-Metro generator #95 Ecovox Dartmouth Solar Racing Hanover NH 1-person purpose-built / / lead acid + ethanol Honda generator #96 Project e- Mt. Everett Project e- Sheffield MA S-10 Chevy pick-up / / propane + solar #99 Surge Surge Motor Corp Ridgeway CO Electric Hyper Car Open Category #89 Envirocycle III Central CT Solar Electric New Britain CT Motorcycle #90 EcoScoot(tm) II Doran Motor Company Anaheim CA Pre-production prototype scooter / Optima / lead acid #91 Wild Cherry Empyreum, Inc. Austin TX Yamaha conversion 2 wheel / Electrosource Horizon / lead acid #49 ERANGE Schiller Group Germany Pre-production prototype scooter / Electrosource Horizon / advanced lead acid #92 Sunpacer Cato-Meridian HS Tech Team Cato NY One-person purpose built / Exide / lead acid #93 TNE III Team New England Nahant MA One-person purpose built / Exide / lead acid #94 Hopper EV Tom Hopper Concord NH One-person purpose built / East Penn / lead acid If you would like to volunteer to help at the race, call the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) at 413 774-6051. I'm sure they'll be glad to hear from you. Mike Bianchi American Tour de Sol, car list According to the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA), sponsor of the American Tour de Sol, as of the May newsletter, the list of entrants is (subject to my typos): RACE CATEGORY NUMBER NAME TEAM NAME TOWN STATE CAR TYPE / BATTERY MFG / CHEMISTRY Production Category #50 Solectria/Horizon CT EV Project/EWS/NAVC Hartford CT sedan to-be-announced #51 '95 Solectria Force CT EV Project/EWS Hartford CT 1995 Solectria Force / SAFT / Nickel Cadmium #7 Nordic Challenger EVermont/NAVC Waterbury VT 1994 Solectria Force / Sonnenschein / lead acid #62 Solectria E-10 NAVC/Hanscom AFB Boston MA 1994 Chevy S-10 / / lead acid #54 US Electricar Bus New England Power Service Westboro MA US Electricar Bus / / lead acid #55 Ford Ecostar Northeast Utilities Hartford CT Ford Ecostar van / ABB / Sodium Sulphur Discovery Channel Commuter Category #60 Millenium Falcon Blue Sky Club Greenwich CT VW sedan / Trojan / lead acid #61 Solar Bolt Bolton High School Bolton CT 1974 Fiat sedan / Trojan / lead acid #64 Kineticar II CSERT-NVCTC Waterbury CT Chevy S-10 pick-up / Trojan / lead acid #53 Elfa Electra (Skoda) EV Elfa Electra Automotive Jamestown NY / / #65 Electric Hare Falmouth Wattsmen Falmouth ME VW Rabbit / US Battery / lead acid #66 Genesis I Genesis Team Saginaw MI Dodge D-50 pick-up / Trojan / lead acid #67 ZeeVee88 GLEAA & GLEAN Westerville OH Purpose-built (EV Motor Sports) / / lead acid #68 Solar Flair I Greenwich Solar Flair Greenwich CT VW Rabbit / Trojan / lead acid #71 S-15 Truck Minuteman Science-Technology Lexington MA Chevy S-15 truck / Trojan / lead acid #63 Solectria Sunrise NAVC Boston MA Pre-production prototype / Ovonic / Nickel Metal Hydride #72 Sungo NHTI Solar Car Team Concord NH purpose-built 2-seater / Sears / lead acid #73 Electric Fiero Orr Electric Racing Team Cincinnati OH Fiero / GNB / lead acid #74 Lightning Volt Parkland HS / Lehigh Co VTS Orefield PA Chevy S-10 truck / Trojan / lead acid #75 KA1000 Polytech Chargers Farmingdale NY / Trojan / lead acid #76 RHAM Rod RHAM Science & Tech. Hebron CT 1985 Nissan Pulsar / Trojan / lead acid #78 Sofix Sedan Sofix Design Nagoya Japan Nissan / / #79 1958 Berkeley Team New England Nahant MA 1958 Berkeley roadster / / #80 Brock Electruck Thousand Islands Sec. School Brockville, GMC Truck / / Ontario Canada #69 Commuter Villanova University Villanova PA Purpose-built / Exide / lead acid #81 Sparky Wooster's Charge Danbury CT Saab sedan / Trojan / lead acid #82 Grey Ghost Yankee Ingenuity Marlborough CT 1929 Mercedes replica / GNB / lead acid Solar Racing Category #83 Sol Survivor III ConVal Solar Racing Team Dublin NH Tour de Sol racer / GNB / lead acid #98 Solar Flyer FHS Solar Car Team Framingham MA Tour de Sol racer / Sears gel cell / lead acid #84 Suntech NHTI Solar Car Team Concord NH Tour de Sol racer / Trojan / lead acid #37 Ottawa Orange II OHHS Tech Prep Race Team Grand Rapids MI Cross Continental racer / Exide / lead acid #85 Photon Salisbury School Salisbury CT Tour de Sol racer / Sears / lead acid #28 TNE II Team New England Nahant MA Solar Racing / Exide / lead acid #87 Spirit of Massachusetts Univ. of Mass. Lowell Lowell MA Cross Continental racer / US Battery / lead acid #88 Mach .05, UVM UVM Mach .05 Racing Team Burlington VT Tour de Sol / Interstate / lead acid Open Hybrid Category #3 Tempest Cornell HEV Ithica NY 2-person purpose built / / lead acid + CNG Geo-Metro generator #95 Ecovox Dartmouth Solar Racing Hanover NH 1-person purpose-built / / lead acid + ethanol Honda generator #96 Project e- Mt. Everett Project e- Sheffield MA S-10 Chevy pick-up / / propane + solar #99 Surge I Surge Motor Corp Ridgeway CO Electric Hyper Car Open Category #89 Envirocycle III Central CT Solar Electric New Britain CT Motorcycle #49 ERANGE Schiller Group Germany Pre-production prototype scooter / Electrosource Horizon / advanced lead acid #91 Wild Cherry WE'RE It Austin TX Yamaha conversion 2 wheel / Electrosource Horizon / advanced lead acid #92 Sunpacer Cato-Meridian HS Tech Team Cato NY One-person purpose built / Exide / lead acid #93 TNE III Team New England Nahant MA One-person purpose built / Exide / lead acid #94 Hopper EV Tom Hopper Concord NH One-person purpose built / Deka Dominator / lead acid These two former entries have apparently dropped out since my last posting: #77 Dalliance So. Maine Technical College So. Portland ME Renault / / lead acid #90 EcoScoot(tm) II Doran Motor Company Anaheim CA Pre-production prototype scooter / Optima / lead acid So that leaves 45 cars in the race, and the entry list is closed, subject to dropouts and replacements from the waiting list. American Tour de Sol, 1995: Day 1 Whoever is in charge of ordering the weather this year once again gets our praise. It was a perfect spring day today at Library Park in Waterbury CT. The event promises to be more interesting than ever, with a bus, several custom made cars, 3 hybrid powered cars, a car constructed by an ELEMENTARY(!) school team, plus cars from Japan, the Czech Republic, and Canada in the race. But, I arrived before most of the cars were here, so I started my interviews with Jay Tarler who was working on the charging panel that was donated by General Public Utilities, General Electric and Northeast Utilities to NESEA last year. This panel has a capacity of over 600 Amperes, 3-phase (delta). There are 4 subpanels and 81(!) plugs. Most of the plugs are rated either 120 volts at 20 or 30 Amps or 240 at 15, 20, and 30 Amps, plus a couple of 3-phase 50 Amp outlets used last year by the Chrylser mini-vans. All the outlets are protected by Ground Fault Interrupters (GFIs). This year, each car's charger will be connected to it's own Watt-hour meter, they can measure exactly how much energy was delivered to each car. Each car also has its own Watt-hour meter on the leads to the motor, so the energy actually delivered to the motor will also be measured. In this way, the total energy used for charging can be compared to the energy that actual results in propelling the car and thus the efficiency of the charging/storage/controller system can be calculated. In addition, the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA, the sponsor of the race) has issued what American Tour de Sol (ATdS) Director Nancy Hazard calls the "NESEA Energy Challenge". The idea is to quantify the amount of energy (measured in equivalent barrels of oil) it takes to move different cars down the road. This metering will let them calculate a "wells to wheels efficiency rating" for traditional Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles, pure Electric Vehicles (EVs) and Hybrid-Electric Vehicles (HEVs). Bob Goodrich, who built the original ATdS charging panels, now retired from Northeast Utilities, will be doing the calculations, which will include estimates for the efficiency of the power plant (modeled as a modern turbine oil-fired plant), the transmission line loss, etc. The results will be in a paper to be presented at the Sustainable Transportation/Solar and Electric Vehicles conference this fall. The efficiency study is funded by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). In addition to the vehicle system efficiency measures, there is an additional test, funded by a grant from the Electric Vehicle Research Network, that looks at the "quality" of the electricity at the charging station. Of particular interest is the so-called "charger harmonics". At last year's race, several cars wound up not getting full charges because the circuit breakers kicked out. The culprit was rumored to be the "harmonics", essentially electrical noise created by the charger on the electric line, that caused the breakers to trip. Look for more on all this later. Ah, but you probably really wanted to hear about cars! The Solar Bolt, number 61 from Bolton High School, Bolton CT, is the returning Lead-Acid battery Champion. In the 1994 ATdS, this car did 141.7 miles on a single charge on a 120 Volt, Trojan T145 battery, Advanced DC motor and a Curtis controller. Tom Aitkin and Brad Koerner said that, in fact, the Curtis controller died a couple of days ago, and they have replaced it with the new 500 Amp Curtis. Other than that, it is the same electrical system, including the same batteries. The only modification is an extension to the belly pan to close an air-gap. The car itself is adapted from a 1974 Fiat, found rusting in the woods. Another returning vehicle, after skipping last year's race is number 83, the Sol Survivor III by the ConVal Solar Race Car Team which will be in the Solar Racing category. (No plugging in allowed!) Paul Waterman, and advisor to the high school team from Dublin NH, said that they haven't been idle. Last year the car climbed Mt Washington in the "Race to the Clouds". The car has been much improved. It now has a second motor as a result of the hill climbing experience, better instrumentation to aid in energy management, and a student team with each member performing specific functions; mechanics, electricals, cooks, first aid, etc. The car body is somewhat modified from two years ago, with a larger spoiler (topped with solar cells) that has moved rearward quite a distance so as not to shadow the solar cells on the roof. There are also solar cells on the hood, and a panel that is carried in the car that can be set up at each stop to collect some extra rays. The solar panels total 680 Watts. The energy system charges 60 Volts of GNB sealed gel-pack batteries. The two motors are each 6 Horse Power (HP) brushed DC motors which drive the wheels through a two-speed transmission. Top speed is somewhere above 50 mph, but the most efficient speed is closer to 30 mph. And when it climbed Mt Washington, it made about 25 mph. Larry Dussault is the editor of the Great Lakes Electric Auto Association (GLEAA) and the Great Lakes Electric Auto News (GLEAN), although he claims the GLs now stand for GLobal, since they have over 3000 members from around the world. He and Michael Beebe are here from Ohio with the ZeeVee 88, number 67. Why 88? "8 hours to recharge, and we are looking for 80 miles to a charge." The car has a Honda Civic frame, with an added integrated roll cage around the driver, a custom fiberglass body, two seats, convertible hard-top, and a gross weight of 2300 pounds (with driver). The 120 Volt Genisis battery system consists of 3 strings in parallel (30 of the 26 Amp-hour units!). The Curtis 500-Amp controller drives an Advanced DC motor. It is for sale! A mere $30,000 will get you this beautiful, bright red car. 513 599-1233. Michael Beebe earns at least some of his living by testing vehicles. He and Bob Batson gave a very compelling pair of safety talks at the ST/SEV conference last fall. At the ATdS this year, Michael and Gary Carr are going to judge the high school cars and hand out safety plaques for the best. Michael Orr is also here from Ohio, with number 73, the Electric Fiero, sponsored by the Cincinnati Gas and Electric Co. It is a gold 1986 Pontiac Fiero, converted using 9-inch Advanced DC motor, 12 12-Volt sealed GNB batteries, Curtis 1231 500-Amp controller, and Michael's own custom designed charger, "because it was cheaper." The adaptation is very clean. The trunk is still there (as much as a Fiero trunk ever was ;-) ), the motor is bolted directly to the transmission, and all the original gauges still work. "The car still has all its crashworthiness and safety." Stop speed is 75 mph, and a range of "40 miles in a hilly area." ((That is going to be quite a challenge considering some of the legs of the race are over 65 miles.)) Number 93, Helios the Heron II, comes from the Riverside School in Lyndonville VT, an > elementary < school, grades 4 through 8, of 43 students. I spoke with Anna Van Fleet, one of the students. The new car looks nothing like the car this school entered in the ATdS last year (and which never actually ran) but in fact it shares a skeletal frame, the motor, and battery from the original. The whole school got involved with the project again, and a few are lucky enough to come along for the race. Forest Reider, in the 7th grade, said, "The car has 6 16 Volt solar panels made from used solar cells" (which are brown instead of the usual blue). "(It also has) 9 12-Volt batteries, a motor that requires 120 volts. It took us 5 million, billion, quadrillion rivets and a lot of time, a lot of Bondo, and a lot of duct tape," according to Anna. The flyer handed out by the students says the parts of this year's car (shocks, struts, steering linkage and column) come from a Ford Festiva, which the students "ripped apart." The motor chain-drives the single rear wheel. Since none of the students is old enough to drive, the car is driven by their Latin/English/Phys-Ed teacher Karen Budde. When I saw the car, it was moving under its own power, although it was making a popping sound (that sounded sort of like back-firing(?)) and by the time it climbed the small hill up the grass to the testing area, the front wheels were leaning in a most disconcerting manner. A bolt through the wheel hub was not holding properly, but did not break or strip. Number 70 is the SUN-BUNNY, a converted VW Rabbit. The project is by the Fall Mountain High School in Alstead NH. Aaron Blake told me that it has a 144 Volt system made of Deka Dominator batteries, the 500 Amp Curtis controller, and the 9-inch Advanced DC motor. The car has been on the road 3 days, so this is the first real test of its capabilities. Why so late, if they started working on the project in October? "We got our money on April 20th. So we got the call that our grant was accepted and cut POs (purchase orders) 2 seconds later," Aaron told me. Number 64 is the Kineticar II, returning again from Connecticut Solar Electric Racing Team/Nougatuk Valley Community Technical College (CSERT-NVCTC). Arthur Gagnon told me that this has the same battery pack as last year, and the aging seems to have helped. They also added sway bars that have improved their steering performance. Again we have 20 6-Volt batteries, 400-Amp Curtis controller, and an 9-inch Advanced DC motor. Number 74 is the Lightning Volt from Parkland High School/Leigh County Vo- Tech. This bright red, shiny S-10 conversion is actually the same one that raced in the 1994 ATdS. Jeromia Jarecke and Monique Polk told me that the team put a lot effort into body work, including a sun roof (added when someone sanded through the roof), a new interior, slightly more efficient solar panels, and a laptop to plot data from the Watt-hour meter as they drive. They also added regenerative braking by putting a magnetic clutch on the motor which engages a belt drive to an alternator. When going down a hill, they down-shift to get the motor spinning really fast, engage the clutch and put about 11 Amps back into the batteries. Number 89, Envirocycle III is from Central Conneticut State University (CCSU). Dave Kohlen, Evan Anozine, Alfred Yeats and Glen Dobbs told me about this motor cycle that started life as a Szuzuki JS6R-1100. It now runs on 72 Volts provided by lead-acid gel-cell batteries. They power an 11 HP Uniq brushless DC permanent-magnet motor that drives the rear wheel through a grip-notch toothed belt. They expect a range of about 100 miles, with a maximum speed of 75 mph, although they have geared it for most-efficient speed of 35 to 40 mph. They don't really know what they are going to get because the bike arrived with 5 miles on it. The students designed the bike during the fall and actually started building it during the spring semester. The frame is augmented with steel to help take the extra 300 pounds of the batteries. CCSU arrived with their "traditional" portable building. This huge trailer comes complete with a small machine shop and, new this year, some bunk beds. In the past, the chargers have not always worked properly during the overnight charging, so now they will station someone at the charging station to deal with any problems that arise overnight. David Fabricatore represents the Connecticut Commuter Electric Vehicle Demonstration Program. They are going to have 5 Solectria Force cars to test for commuter uses within the state. This 18 month project will have volunteers using the cars for commuting and carpooling. In the ATdS, they have two Forces. Number 50 is powered by Electrosource Horizon batteries. It was finished up Friday night and driven to Waterbury by Solectria this morning. It is a 156 Volt system with 14,400 Watt-hours of capacity. Number 51 is running a 156 Volt pack of Interstate wet-cell batteries, to deal with the 70 mile days in the race, and will be driven by students from the Ethel Walker school in Simsbury. (In the project, number 51 will be running Sonnenschein gel-cell batteries which do not require maintenance, but don't have quite as much range.) I came across Helios the Heron, number 93, again, this time with its front wheels taken off. Vesilli Germoloe, one of the students, said that one of the bolts proved to be too small and so their shop teacher was out looking for a larger pair of bolts. We will return to this saga later. (Remember, this is the car built by elementary school students.) Genesis I, number 66, returns for the third year. This Dodge D-50 truck is the project of Mark Parthe. He has the new Curtis 1231 500-Amp controller and has put a clutch on the regen. Mark had an alternator driven off the motor that he would activate when going down hills. But he discovered that when the alternator was not active, but just free-wheeling, it still produced a drag equivalent to 100 Watts per kiloWatt(!). The regen only increases the range about 3 to 5 percent, but he feels that the real advantage is that the regen helps in braking and therefore you don't have to use the service brakes all the time. Mark put 6000 miles on the truck last year in daily commuting. He is looking for a range of 80 miles this year. He is still running the 20 Trojan T145s (120 Volt) system he ran last year and expects that the battery pack age is what will keep him from doing 100 miles per charge. John Beaudoin is here with the "Spirit of Massachusetts" from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. It was constructed for and ran in the 1993 Sunrace from Texas to Minnesota and is here at the ATdS in the Solar Racing category. It has a 4130 chromolly steel tubing frame weighing somewhere between 75 and 100 pounds. The front body (essentially the driver's compartment and front wheel faring) is made of a Kevlar-foam-Kevlar sandwich. The rear body, which supports the rear frame and wheels and solar panel, has an (some would say "old fashioned") aircraft-skin of doped fabric. ((For those who never made model airplanes with doped fabric wings, before there was monokote, model and real airplanes, including my Piper TriPacer, had a frame that was covered with a cloth envelope and then painted with a "dope" that both sealed the fabric and caused it to pull tight over the frame.)) That was added last year to reduce weight. The motor is an 11 horsepower brushless DC which drives one wheel through a chain drive, and can also provide regen braking. The solar array is made up of 12 panels, totaling 1000 Watts (full sun peak). Each of the panel modules is held to the "wing" by Velcro, so that a defective module can be swapped out quickly. The solar array maximum power-point tracker was built in 1993 by a graduate student and still works very well. Spencer Quang is here again representing Argonne National Laboratories and he has been performing the electrical safety tests on the vehicles. ((Maybe I should explain. As part of the registration procedure, each car is gone over by several teams of people to determine its vital statistics and make sure it meets the myriad ATdS rules. These range from the trivial requirement that each vehicle have at least 1 square foot of solar panel, reflecting the NESEA commitment to "sustainable energy", to very serious requirements for minimum acceleration, minimum attainable speed, maximum allowable braking distance, minimum acceptable maneuvering speed, and working brake lights, turn signals, horn, etc. In addition to these normal, traditional car-safety concerns, there are several tests associated with the nature of electric vehicles; things like battery containment, battery hold- down, and electrical leakage from the propulsion energy system to the frame. After all, these are HIGH VOLTAGE systems!)) So Spencer has been measuring the electrical leakages from the plus and minus ends of the battery pack to ground through a 10,000 ohm resister. (The human body is on the order of 10,000 ohms, presumably thumb-to-thumb.) The race rule is 1 milliAmp, which will give the average person a very nasty shock. 5 milliAmps is considered fatal. Most of the cars have gotten through with no problems, but there have been some some unwelcomed surprises. Most have been found very quickly. For example, a team may wash their car and if water gets on the wiring or into the battery box, that could cause a leakage, at least until the water evaporates. Then they pass easily. ((But it makes you wonder about that big puddle out there.)) Others it has been more problematic. In one case, number 74, "Lighning Volt", had a 12 milliAmp(!) leakage from the battery to the frame. They eventually figured out that the heater system was connecting 120 volts to the frame. It was easily isolated and they then passed. However, this may have been a long standing problem that had not been previously detected. ((The gotcha in all this is that a leakage problem could be completely invisible up to the moment that someone is electrocuted. It seems to me like a very reasonable maintenance item to periodically check the leakage of the pack to the frame. I also noted that someone else who was having leakage problems was wearing elbow-length rubber gloves while he had his hands deep under the hood with his meter probes. What just yesterday would have struck me as excessive caution suddenly made a lot of sense.)) Number 94 is the Hopper EV, a personal project of Tom Hopper of the New Hampshire Technical Institute (NHTI). This single passenger, 3-wheel, custom-built vehicle is back for the third year and, once again, is quite different from it's previous appearance. He now has 10 Deka Dominator sealed gel-cell batteries that weigh 620 pounds and make up a 120 Volt pack. They are of the "starved electrolyte" design, which protects the plates when they are deeply discharged, so Tom said he expects to get over 10,000 miles out of the set. ((Previously he had been running Sears DieHards.)) This year the powerplant is the new Solectria ACgu AC induction motor, which Tom says he likes because the "sweet spot" ((range of speeds which have maximum torque)) is very broad. He says the gets full torque up to 4000 rpm, and can get up as high as 10,000 rpm. The result is that Tom has removed the two-speed transmission he had before, and now uses a fixed 9:1 reduction from the motor to the rear drive wheel. He has also changed the front wheel brake pads to make them more "aggressive" and thereby guaranteeing that the front wheels will lock up before the rear wheel. Last year, the Hopper EV had to drop out of the race on the third day because the pin that held a pinion gear in the steering reducer to a shaft sheered, because it was undersized. This also took the NHTI "SunTech" solar racing vehicle out, even though it did not fail, because it shared the same steering component design. An added sway bar and a new custom built steering reducer completes the modifications for this year. Tom is looking forward to finally using the car for its intended purpose: commuting. After 3 years of designing, building, redesigning, etc. he feels it is finally the way he likes it. Number 54 is the bus, built by US Electricar. I spoke with John Duffy of University of Massechusetts, Lowell, and Charlie Fitzpatrick of Lowell Regional Transit Authority. The bus seats 14 people and has room for 6 standees. It has a range of about 35 miles at 25 mph, depending on load, stops, etc. It has two 25 HP brushed DC motors, connected in tandem via a belt system that drives the differential (without a transmission) to the two rear wheels. The battery pack has a capacity of 44 kiloWatt-hours made up of two strings of 120 Volts each. The Curtis controllers are custom built for this bus and can provide regen braking by using the motors as generators. There is also power steering and power brakes. It is the only electric bus in New England and is used everyday to provide shuttle service between the "T" station in Lowell to the various campuses of the University. A battery swap is performed in the middle of the day, and it takes about 15 minutes to open up the side panels, pull out the spent packs and replace them with freshly charged packs. The bus is a "California bus", lacking both air conditioning and heating. The ridership seems to be very aware of the non-polluting nature of the vehicle. Eventually, they hope to provide 70 percent, or maybe someday all, of the recharging energy through a photovoltaic array. Thomas Faul is from Elfa Electra Automotive and has number 53, the Elfa (Skoda) EV. Skoda is a automaker in the Czech Republic and Elfa is about to start importing electric vehicles to Jamestown NY. Skoda is the largest automobile manufacturer in Eastern Europe, a 137 year old company. They make, in addition to cars, locomotives, transmission equipment, transformers, power generating systems, etc. They are sort of the General Electric of Eastern Europe. The car is a remanufactured 1300cc gasoline car called the Favorit. The car is completely reworked for electric propulsion with strengthening of the chassis, plus different springs, shock absorbers and suspension. Two models are converted to EV. The one in the race is what I would call a "microvan"; it is a tiny pickup truck, much smaller than a Chevy S-10, with a tall cap on it that would be good for urban delivery. The other is a four- door sedan. A third conversion, a mini-van, is just going into production in the Czech Republic. The plan is to import these also, in a knocked-down configuration, so that about 20 vehicles will fit in the space of about 3 fully assembled units. They will be then completed and sold. The motor is a Vues Czech series wound DC motor rated at 15.6 kiloWatts, 350 Amps at 84 Volts. The 84 Volt battery pack is made up of 14 Crown 6 Volt batteries. "84 Volts was chosen deliberately because it is benign, you cannot hurt yourself," according to Faul. "The controller is also Czech made, by Ellis, and it is a little more sophisticated than what everybody is used to here. It monitors motor rpm, vehicle speed, Voltage, Amperage, and kiloWatt consumption. It computer calculates the right values and if you exceed it, the computer cuts you off." In particular, trying to race the motor in neutral, which can blow up an unprotected motor, is prevented. The motor drives a transaxle transmission, with clutch, 4 gears forward, one reverse. Regen braking is accomplished through the controller changing the motor into a generator, and is activated by the brake pedal. There are other levels of power systems. A city system, which is the one described here, has a 50 mph top speed and 50 mile range and a battery life of 3 years. The next level uses nickel-cadmium batteries with twice the range and a 10 year life. The charger is also Czech made, that operates in the constant current/ constant voltage mode, and takes a 220 Volt AC connection. The charging plug is under the front of the hood and is plugged into a jack when the car is driven. Since it must be unplugged to charge, the car is automatically made not drivable. The ATdS is the first showing of this vehicle, although "the effort started in 1990, right after the Communists were defeated. We have been selling them since 1993, with over 400 in public use in Western Europe, Germany, France, Switzerland, England, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the Czech Republic," says Faul. "It is a car built for the dreadful roads in the Czech Republic, which are cobble-stone covered, and it will take punishment like you won't believe." The Elfa "microvan" is a production car and is for sale at $16,385. The sedan is $18,365. The NiCd batteries add $5,000. For more info: 716- 484-8185, fax 716-483-0728. I caught up again with Micheal Beebe, builder of number 67, the ZeeVee 88. Larry Dusault had said that there was a kit version of this design available, so I asked about prices and such. Michael said that while they are considering it, they don't have production, prices and such worked out yet. So I guess the message is "stay tuned." Roger Titus, who is the advisor to the Solar Bolt, number 61, made the claim last year that you could push their 3200 pound car on a level surface with one finger. Well, today I did just that. Well, two fingers. I hooked them over the bumper and (once the emergency brake was off) just pulled steadily and it came along. The low rolling resistance is attributed to brakes that do not drag. On a brake cylinder, you have a piston that is sealed with an rubber ring. When the piston is pushed out, the rubber ring deforms slightly. If the pistons and cylinder are truly round, the rubber ring will pull the back and bring the brake pad with it, and thus not dragging on the brake disk. "On your American and all your regular cars, they don't machine them fine enough. So we took them out, made them truly round, and made them work," said Titus. They also made the car, a 1974 Fiat X19, aerodynamic by making fiberglass farings, so the air would not burble over bumps and around corners. A air dam completely seals off the normal grill on the front of the car, a major source of drag, according to Titus. Also, the hub caps are plane, flat pans, again to cut drag. And the wheel wells are shaped so the air gets shot around the tires; "the tires would act like a big windmill otherwise, that chew up a lot of energy. The biggest gain is at the first impact that the air sees, and you gain less as you go back on the car." Car number 80, the Brock Electruck, from Thousand Islands Secondary School in Brockville, Ontario, Canada. Rick Zeilstra, one of the advisors, described the vehicle as a GMC 1500 4-wheel drive truck donated by GM Canada. It uses a 9-inch Advanced DC motor, the 500 Amp Curtis controller and 24 6-Volt batteries. It is still a 4-wheel drive vehicle, although they drive it in 2- wheel mode. They just finished the car last week, and so the batteries are "uncured." Right now they are up to about 120 kilometers (65 miles) per charge, and are hoping that that will improve during the race. This is a BIG truck, not like the little Chevy S-10s. It weighs 6900 pounds(!) mostly due to the very large batteries. They are Interstate "Workaholic" batteries, used in commercial floor scrubbers, that weigh 130 pounds each, and are rated at 230 minutes at 75 Amps. (Each battery is about twice as tall as a normal battery -- visualize two Trojan T145s stacked.) The truck took a year to convert. They started with 12 students, but wound up with 8. Five of those came along for the race. The students built adaptor plates in the school shops, and frame, to keep the cost of the conversion down. American Tour de Sol, 1995: The race begins I have no official results yet, but I thought I would at least tell you that the race did in fact start and most of the vehicles made it from Waterbury CT to Northampton MA. Tid-bits: <> The electric bus did not run the first leg, as planned. With it's very limited range and speed, it was decided that it will only start running today; at least that is my unofficial understanding. <> The "Wild Cherry" motor bike run by the WE'RE IT team was not ready at the start. They were having trouble with their DC-DC converter and wiring. <> The Electric Fiero had problems with 3 overheating batteries and decided to quit after about 30 miles. They are going to try again tomorrow. <> The Envirocycle III didn't have enough torque to climb a long hill at the beginning of the course. <> The Solar Flyer blew a tire. The support vehicle for the Polytech Charger, number 75, (which I haven't written about yet), had an old fashioned vulcanizing patching kit, and Solar Flyer was able to continue on its way. <> Wooster's Charge (also not reported on yet) made it all the way, but had problems with their brakes overheating. After those long hills to climb, there were long hills to descend, at 20 to 35 mph. They stopped, cooled their brakes with water, and then continued to the finish. <> At one point I saw the Ottowa Orange trailer, but could not see the car. I thought they > might < be in the trailer, but a few miles down the road there was Ottowa Orange, going along just fine. They made it all the way to the finish line. <> I saw the Mach .05 sitting at the side of the road, and thought they might be in trouble, but they said they were just collecting some sun to boost the batteries a bit more. I don't know if they made it all the way. By the way, Mach .05 is 38 mph, which was the top speed of the car last year. Now it can do 47.2 mph according Jason Butterfield, a team member. <> The ERANGE motor bike was about 5 miles from the finish, at the side of the road, resting their batteries. I think they eventually crossed the finish line. American Tour de Sol, 1995: More Car Descriptions Car 51, is a 1995 Solectria Force (which is based on the Geo Metro LSI sedan model, instead of the Geo Metro hatchback). It is being driven by an all girls team of students from the Ethel Walker School. The Ethel Walker school is a private school in Simsbury CT. They built a solar car called "Sol Dancer" that raced in the ATdS in 1993. Greenwich High School's Solar Flair I is number 68, returning for the third year. Mark Smith described it as having a 9-inch Advanced DC motor powered by 20 6-Volt Trojan T145 batteries through a Curtis 1221 controller, in a 1978 Volkswagon Rabbit body with a Rabbit diesel transmission. This year they have added a radio (take care of the important things :-), replaced the speedometer, and added hold-down straps for the batteries. And -> special preview <- watch next year for their all solar car. Becky Guartha is one of the students from Mt Everett High School's Project e- (pronounced "E Minus"). This Chevy S-10 conversion is the same vehicle as raced last year, but it is > not < the same. As Becky described it, what was once a purely plug-in-to-charge electric vehicle is now a series hybrid. They have added a propane-fueled 22 horsepower (12 kW) Kohler internal combustion engine that drives a Fisher 3 phase, 12 kW, 120 volt, 92 Amp generator. (The engine/generator system is sold by Solar Car Corporation in Melbourne, Florida.) It either idles or is manually throttled up to charge the batteries or take up some of the motor load while underway. The projected range is 300 to 500 miles on a 10 gallon tank of propane. There are 20 6-Volt batteries and the motor is a 28 HP Advanced DC. A 30 Amp alternator with electric clutch adds regen braking. Becky and Rachele Batacchi are the school's first female navigator and driver team. Rachele spoke about having to watch the Amp meter and the tachometer to decide when to shift for best efficiency. Jake Dupont is a mechanic on the team. He said that when the batteries are fully charged a regulator detects that and automatically throttles back the engine to idle to prevent overcharging. The Ecovox is from Dartmouth University is number 95. Jeff Braciak described this series hybrid vehicle, meaning that only the batteries drive the wheels. The batteries are charged by a 1.4 kW Honda generator which was converted to ethanol from a tank that I guess is about 1 gallon. The driver has a single switch to start and stop the generator. The 120 Volt AC output is run through a diode bridge and voltage regulator to get it to the 72 Volts DC needed to charge the batteries. The car body looks like one you would see on a solar car, but the solar panel is missing. It is a thin tappered tube, about 12 feet long, with two wheels in the front and a single driven wheel in the rear. The electric motor is a 7 HP brushless DC, supplied by 6 small Sears DieHard tractor batteries. Before the race, the electric drive had gone about 200 miles, and the generator system had about 50 miles. It can do 45 to 55 mph. During inspection the Ecovox had a ground fault which took a couple of hours to isolate and repair. RHAM Rod is number 76, from Rham Science and Technical High School in Hebron CT. John Dudek is the faculty advisor and this car is back for (at least) its third year. What's different this year? The battery pack has been increased from 96 Volts to 120. Same old controller, same old motor. ((Presumably a Curtis 400 Amp and an Advanced DC 9-inch.)) Last year, John was praising the `BATT juice' battery additive (from B.A.T Technologies) that he was using in his batteries. He felt they were giving him something extra. This year, he added the extra batteries late, and so did not have time to get the additive into the new ones, thus they are running with a mixed system: new batteries without additive plus old batteries with. But the new batteries will get "juiced" after the race. Why? "Because we got 23.76 kiloWatts out of a 96 Volt system last year, with Trojan T145s," says John. Ottawa Orange II is number 37 again this year, basicly the same chassis and solar panel arrangement as last year, but with some differences. Josh Ike, James Merriweather, and Randy Mahar told me they increased the battery pack from 32 Volts to 74 Volts, using Advotech batteries. They also replaced the wooden plank which is the flexible element of the front wheels suspension in the 3-wheeled vehicle, and put in a new braking system. The solar panel has been increased to 1300 Watts and the instrumentation has been localized so the driver can easily see every gauge. The box tubing frame is the same as last year, although the mylar fabric cover is now thicker, and the nose is more aerodynamic to reduce drag. This 800 pound vehicle has been tested up to 65 mph, and the range has been tested at 200 miles(!). The first day of testing, Saturday, the solar panel was cutting out as it flexed while being driven. By the time they figured out what was wrong, almost all the stores were closed. At the last minute, they found some curtain rods (the rectangular cross- section sheet metal types) and used them to brace the outside edges of the panel against the lower frame of the car, forming your classic triangular brace. The team was 13 students with specialties of mechanical, electrical, body, design, business, and coordinator. The project was completed for an estimated cost of $20,840. ((Many of the student vehicles have handouts with the vital statistics, participants, advisors, sponsors, etc. The Ottawa Orange II is one of the best. It is also dedicated to Dwakeely S. McMillan, February 20, 1976 - March 12, 1995.)) Erik Wachtmeister is the co-president of the team that built Photon, number 86, which won the Tour de Sol racing class in the 1994 ATdS. "This year the front wheels have been redone completely. They are two inches taller, have new rims, new centers, new tubes that are Kevlar reinforced and are racing slicks. There is a better seat which is more comfortable, the lights are more aerodynamic, we now have two rearview mirrors instead of one, and have rigged up a helmet communication system between the driver and the chase vehicle. We now have more a more accurate reading of the power consumption that is hooked up to a computer that periodically saves the information" for later analysis. A fan on the back helps keep the motor cool. The battery is a 84 Volt pack built from 7 Sears DieHard deep cycle RV/Marine batteries. The 8 HP brushless DC motor and controller are made by Solectria. The frame is welded aluminum tubing covered with a vacuum bag molded body made of 6 pieces. The body skin is two layers of Kevlar with a foam core. The front suspension is off a Yamaha Blaster ATV, the rear suspension is off a Yamaha 176 motorcycle. The solar panel is made up of 8 modules of 20 Volts and 60 Watts each. All the above is the same as last year. The team was made up of 30 students, with 5 faculty advisors. Various subteams tackled the improvements listed above. For example, the new seat was done by underclassmen. Angelo Esposito built Fulmine, number 69, after helping Scott Isgar build his "Solar Delivery" Volkswagon Vanagon conversion that raced in the ATdS last year. Fulmine is a conversion of a 1980 Hundai donated to Angelo. The primary reason for doing the conversion was to let Angelo experiment with his own transmission design. After about 700 miles of testing, he removed the transmission and gave it to a machine shop to build as a final product, which is in the works right now. Just for the race, he reinstalled the original Hundai transmission. The battery pack is 10 12-Volt Deka Dominators type 8GHD, > huge < beasts which weigh 161 pounds each! These drive a 400 Amp Curtis controller which in turn drives a 9-inch Advanced DC motor. Angelo is hoping for 100 to 120 miles range. The car has an overall weight of 3500 pounds and can carry 600 pounds. Robert Larsen from Argonne National Lab is the boss of Spencer Quang and Nicole LeBlanc, who were doing the safety test. Argonne is doing several things new this year. DOE, through Argonne, provided free Ampere-hour meters for all the student-built vehicles this year, and worked very hard with NESEA to be sure that almost all the rest of the vehicles would also have them. The result is that the energy consumption readings will be much easier to acquire and compare. ((Two years ago, I remember watching the testing teams going slightly crazy trying to figure out how they were going to connect the Amp- hour meters in for a quick (well, it was supposed to be quick) energy use measurement, and the various owners worrying that the act of installing and removing the wiring and shunt would somehow mess up their car!)) On top of that, they encouraged NESEA to instrument the charging station for both power consumption and power quality, which will now allow them to do a much better job of performing from-the-wall-plug-to-the-wheel energy use analysis. ((In the past power quality has meant power factor and power factor has been measured as the phase angle between the voltage and current waveforms. (((Shades of Electric Machines 101!))) As we will see later, it is now much more complex than that, and a very real problem in EV charging. In particular, some chargers induce huge voltage and current spikes on the AC line, call "harmonics" that can cause real problems.)) Bob does not believe there has ever been such a large group of EVs connected to one charging station, although the APS 500 races have also been a learning experience. Another purpose is to start educating the teams and the EV community to be aware of these issues and how important it is to have very efficient chargers. Bob says they have seen chargers with efficiencies as high as 90% and as low as 30%; a huge variation. Again this year they have 8 data collection memory modules that they will be putting into selected cars, as they did at the 1994 ATdS. These modules record second-by-second data such as motor current and voltage, battery current and voltage, plus there is a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver that lets them collect position, velocity and acceleration from the GPS link. I asked Bob what he thought of the field this year. In general he thought the overall quality of the cars is very much better this year. The Solectria prototype Sunrise is of particular interest, because it points towards the future. Bob is also one of the designated drivers of the most polluting car in the race. A Geo Metro LSI sedan, number 10, is being driven in the race and being timed as if it were a race vehicle. (The Metro is the base vehicle for many conversions, including those that Solectria and BAT Technologies produce.) By using this car as a control vehicle, they will have a very good benchmark for the NESEA Energy Challenge, looking for the car with the best overall energy efficiency and hence the highest oil-well-to-wheel-well equivalent miles-per-gallon of oil. The results of this and other tests will be presented at the Sustainable Transportation Conference in Providence RI this fall and then at the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) conference about 5 weeks later. Speaking of papers, the DOE has been writing EV and Hybrid-EV papers over the years and many are published through the SAE, which has an excellent on-line search system. Contact the SAE for more information. Bob also had high praise for NESEA's organization and operation of the ATdS. "As far as we are concerned, this is biggest bang for the buck that DOE gets. I hope that budget considerations will allow us to be a major sponsor in future years." Number 49 is ERANGE, is a motor scooter built by Helmut Schiller and Wolfgang Woitowicz, who built the CityCat that won the Open Category in the 1994 ATdS. ERANGE claims a range over 100 miles, speed up to 50 mph, weighs 300 pounds, is 100% recharge in 30 minutes, and an efficiency of over 35 miles per kiloWatt-hour. The power comes from 3 12-Volt Horizon batteries delivering 3.4 kiloWatt-hours. This scooter uses the next generation of the motor used on the CityCat. This permanent motor, which boasts 95% efficiency, uses a low-voltage, high-Amperage disk armature that uses copper plates instead of copper wires. The permanent magnets provide the stator (non-rotating) field and the armature has 8 brushes and 129 fields on the commutator which gives very, very smooth acceleration. The controller is a pulse-width modulated type of their own design, but for the ATdS they are using a Curtis controller because that way they can easily get a spare. As I understand it, their intention is to offer a power-train package (motor, controller, and instrumentation) that would be licensed exclusively to a scooter manufacturer to create a line of electric scooters and 3-wheeled vehicles. Business Contacts in the US: Robert Monconduit, 1832 Cedar Oak Road, Placerville CA 95667 FAX: 916-622-8511 Headquarters: Helmut Sciller, Scholzenviertel 7, D-64625 Bensheim, Germany FAX: +49-6251-63213 American Tour de Sol, 1995: first day results Results for Day 2 ((Disclaimers: This is from the official NESEA data sheet for Day 1, May 22, 1995. It is subject to my typos, and the fact that there is an official process by which these numbers can be contested and modified. The race ain't over until its over and NESEA has the last word on final results. Contact them for final final results after the race is over.)) `Miles' in this listing is a combination of race tour miles, extra lap miles, minus "penalty miles" for various reasons including late or early arrival, obstructing traffic, speeding, etc. CATEGORY Miles Number Team Production 238.7 56 Solectria Force GT, Virginia Power 227.8 55 Ford Ecostar 197.5 7 Nordic Challenger 191.5 90 ZAP Powered Rotator 190.1 51 '95 Solectria Force Sedan 186.8 50 Solectria/Horizon Battery 149.8 62 Solectria E-10 57.9 54 US Electricar Shuttle Bus American Commuter 240.0 63 Solectria Sunrise 213.4 61 Solar Bolt 172.0 76 RHAM Rod 180.3 78 Sofix Sedan 155.9 66 Genesis I 142.8 64 Kineticar II 130.3 74 Lightning Volt 134.1 81 Sparky 126.7 72 Sungo 137.6 60 Millenium Falcon 137.8 80 Brock Electruck 167.5 70 Sun-Bunny 126.7 53 Elfa Electra (Skoda) EV 126.7 75 KA1000 128.6 69 Fulmine 117.1 71 S-15 Truck 107.4 65 Electric Hare 95.7 67 ZeeVee 88 75.7 73 Electric Fiero 19.0 68 Solar Flair I 19.0 79 1959 Berkeley 0 82 Gray Ghost Hybrid 172.9 3 Tempest 159.0 96 Project e- 87.8 95 Ecovox Tour de Sol Racing 126.7 85 Photon 126.7 84 Suntech 133.7 83 Sol Survivor III 126.7 98 Solar Flyer 117.5 88 Mach .05, UVM Cross Continental 126.7 87 Spirit of Massachusetts (U Mass, Lowell) 119.4 37 Ottawa Orange Open 126.7 10 Gasoline control vehicle 126.7 92 Sunpacer 126.7 49 ERANGE 110.5 89 Envirocycle III 56.6 91 Wild Cherry 55.4 94 Hopper EV 19.0 93 Helios the Heron 0 28 Team New England II Tid-bits and "sound bytes" from Day 3 ... a 75 mile trip from Keene NH to Lexington MA. Ottawa Orange "ran out of juice" and had to be trailered in. "Something went wrong with the array -- we're producing voltage but no Amps." The Sunpacer did the whole 75 miles which was the furthest they had ever gone on a single charge, and that made them very happy. Wild Cherry damaged its motor very badly. The assembly that holds the 8 brushes, was distorted and there was evidence of the brushes shorting out. Last I saw, the Shuller group, which uses the same Lynch motor in their ERANGE, #49, and is a competitor of Wild Cherry, was trying to get a replacement motor for them. Solar Bolt was in first gear running down a hill, and at about 41 mph, they over-revved the motor which caused it to seize ((... I suspect. As I understand it, over-revving a brushed motor can cause the windings in the armature to expand outward and, if they contact the stator poles, tear things up very badly.)) Bob Batson of Electric Vehicles of America provided a replacement and by the time I saw them, it had already been swapped in. Helios the Heron had problems on Day 2. They went 11.5 miles and then "the computer imploded!" according to Ashley Roslund and Candice Houghton. Translation: the controller burned out. So, the Genesis I team generously offered Helios their spare controller and it was installed late. They also replaced their "pot-box" (accelerator pedal potentiometer) with a manual rheostat. But apparently they did not get a good charge last night, so they only made 6.5 miles. They trailered into Lexington. With luck, they will get a good charge tonight and be back in the race. ((For those who haven't guessed, these kids, and their advisors, have charmed me totally. They are very enthusiastic about what they are doing and are getting real good at staring disappointment in the face and making it blink.)) While the advisors were doing the controller swap, I got to see more of the inside of Helios the Heron. There is an amazing quantity of plywood, "materials that kids can handle," according to Topher Waring, one of the advisors. Another of the children explained her part in fixing a problem where the drive train was rubbing on the frame. Ecovox, the hybrid car from Dartmouth, blew the starting motor to their generator and messed up some of the electrical connections to the generator, and hence did not race Day 2 or Day 3. They have found the part they need and so anticipate a late night tonight so they can race on Day 4. American Tour de Sol, 1995: fourth day results I have skipped Day 3, May 24th. I chose sleep instead, since I have not been feeling 100%, and have been recruited as the race announcer at the finish lines. Results for Day 4 ((Disclaimers: This is from the official NESEA data sheet for Day 4, May 25, 1995. It is subject to my typos, and the fact that there is an official process by which these numbers can be contested and modified. The race ain't over until its over and NESEA has the last word on final results. Contact them for final final results after the race is over.)) `Miles' in this listing is a combination of race tour miles, extra lap miles, minus "penalty miles" for various reasons including late or early arrival, obstructing traffic, speeding, etc. ((These are known as Tour Miles on the data sheet. Previous postings had been in Total Miles. Tour Miles determine pole position at the next day's start and are more in keeping with the car's position in the race, according to NESEA.)) CATEGORY Miles Number Team Production 460.8 56 Solectria Force GT, Virginia Power 442.1 55 Ford Ecostar 375.2 7 Nordic Challenger 362.7 50 Solectria/Horizon Battery 300.5 90 ZAP Powered Rotator 335.2 51 '95 Solectria Force Sedan 311.3 62 Solectria E-10 56.4 54 US Electricar Shuttle Bus Discover Commuter 510.0 63 Solectria Sunrise 401.4 61 Solar Bolt 310.4 66 Genesis I 277.2 64 Kineticar II 272.4 78 Sofix Sedan 268.9 81 Sparky 260.9 60 Millenium Falcon 236.0 70 Sun-Bunny 226.1 74 Lightning Volt 218.9 80 Brock Electruck 218.9 72 Sungo 177.1 53 Elfa Electra (Skoda) EV 155.0 76 RHAM Rod 153.4 75 KA1000 135.7 69 Fulmine 133.6 65 Electric Hare 54.2 71 S-15 Truck -97.4 67 ZeeVee 88 -194.4 73 Electric Fiero 79 1959 Berkeley (may yet show up for race) 68 Solar Flair I (dropped from race, intentionally) 82 Gray Ghost (never showed) Hybrid 407.0 96 Project e- 356.3 3 Tempest -57.3 95 Ecovox Tour de Sol Racing 198.1 85 Photon 54.0 83 Sol Survivor III 40.7 84 Suntech 31.7 98 Solar Flyer -102.2 88 Mach .05, UVM Cross Continental 177.6 87 Spirit of Massachusetts (U Mass, Lowell) 43.5 37 Ottawa Orange Open 293.4 10 Gasoline control vehicle 181.2 49 ERANGE 171.9 92 Sunpacer 3.1 94 Hopper EV -35.1 28 Team New England II -42.2 89 Envirocycle III -278.0 91 Wild Cherry -308.8 93 Helios the Heron ((I must admit, that these numbers give you no idea as to what is happening in the race, but they are the ones that determine each team's "score". I hope the interviews and other reports better communicate what is REALLY going on. I certainly think they do. Speaking of which ...)) Mike Brown told me about Cornell University's hybrid car called the Tempest, number 3. It was built by a group of 50 undergraduate engineers from the disciplines of electrical, mechanical, and chemical engineering, and computer science. The Tempest is not only a Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) fueled series hybrid EV, but it has two(!) different electric drive systems. The small internal combustion engine (ICE) is a three-cylinder Suzuki engine out of a 1994 Geo Metro, derated from 50 HP to 22 HP due to the conversion to CNG. The rear system is a high power, high torque brushed motor from Advanced DC driven by a student-built controller and geared for acceleration and hill climbing. The controller is mounted on a liquid-cooled plate with its own radiator. The front system is a 21 HP brushless DC motor system from Uniq Mobility designed for highly efficient constant speed driving. On the first day of the race, they were having trouble getting up the long and steep hills. It turned out that before the race they had broken their differential on the rear drive system, which they tried to repair with an emergency weld job. But they didn't get the geometry right, and so they had to run without their rear motor the first day. Without the high torque, it was slow going up the hills, but they made it all the way through. Over night (until 3 am) they reworked the repair and got the rear motor back on line. Envirocycle III, number 89, was having trouble the first day because they didn't have enough low-end torque, and no transmission so they could not shift gears. Their rear wheel is driven off the brushless DC motor with a cog belt, so the obvious fix would be to get a larger wheel gear or a smaller motor gear. But Rich Parzych told me that the rear drive gear they need is about 17 inches, but unfortunately the rear tire diameter is 17 inches and they already have the smallest pinion gear. They were still trying to figure out if there was a way to improve things, maybe by using the facilities of one of the high schools we would be stopping at along the way. Otherwise, they will just go along with the race and not plan on placing very high in the rankings. Number 78 is the Calsonic from the Sofix Team from Japan. Jim McCullough is a member of that team, from Colorado, and was explaining things for the rest of the team who had very limited English; my Japanese is not-existent. The vehicle is converted from an Nissan March 5-person car, sold in Japan. It was converted to a two person car with the batteries in the back and under the hood. The drive train is a 42 HP (32 kW) brushless DC system from Uniq Mobility driven by a 204 Volt system made up of Yuasa nickel-zinc batteries. The battery units are very small ((smaller than motorcycle batteries)), rated at 7 Ampere-hours and 13.6 Volts. The advantage of nickel-zinc technology is higher energy density than lead-acid, although in the past they have had sorter than desirable life. They are currently used in uninterruptible power supplies, emergency lighting systems and motorcycles. The car contains 180(!) units. The battery system is wired as 12 strings of 15 units each, making each string 204 Volts at 85 Amp-hours (C/5 rate). The battery company wants the team to only use 4 strings in parallel at a time which makes the current draw closer to the C/1 or C/1.5 rate. Jim would have rathered put more strings in parallel and lower the current draw rate on the batteries. The car arrived in Waterbury a week and a half before the race. The Naugatuck Valley Community-Technical College opened their doors and allowed the team to finish up the car. The car is the project of Hirotaka Ohyabu who is the head of Sofix Design, an industrial design company in Nagoya Japan. He has built solar racing cars that have raced in Australia. He has a dream of taking his solar racing experience and putting it into purpose-built EV, similar in concept to James Worden's Solectria Sunrise. Jim is an independent electronics engineer who is an EV enthusiast and drives an older EV, made with a GE shunt DC motor with both variable field and variable armature voltages using a chopper circuit designed by Soleq in Chicago. Soleq produces traction systems up to locomotive size, but also has a conversion called the EVcort, based on the Ford Escort wagon. American Tour de Sol, 1995: more interviews Greg Perry with the Sol Survivor III team told me about their first day drive. I saw them at one point and thought they might be having problems since they were not moving very fast. But Greg pointed out that since the car has climbed Mount Washington, the hills on the route were no problem. In fact, they were budgeting their energy very carefully since this was the longest route the car has ever driven. They made it all the way. Number 72 is Sungo from New Hampshire Technical Institute and is back for (at least) the third year. Spencer Allen explained that this year the wiring has been improved, a new steering box has improved the handling. They fixed problems they had had with their solar panel, added new instrumentation, and up graded the batter pack up to 120 Volts. Sungo is the only car this year with separate motors for each of the rear wheels, each with a separate controller. The brushless DC motors from Solectria have an electronic differential to keep the rear wheels coordinated when under way. The controllers also have a low/high torque switch, which changes the motor wiring from wye to delta. They claim the car has 100+ mile range, 75 mph top speed, carries two people + 200 pounds of luggage, has a 96 Watt solar array and 10 Trojan 27TMH deep-cycle marine batteries with 9600 Watt-hour capacity. It weighs 1365 pounds. They won the efficiency award for the Discover Commuter class one day at 9 miles per kiloWatt-hour. Sunpacer from Cato-Meridian High School in Cato NY is number 92, back for the 3rd or 4th year. According to Kevin Malda, this year it has new solar cells, and a cleaned up electrical system. They experimented with regenerative braking but it was not operational at the start of the race. The system is 32 Volt system of Deka Dominator batteries driving a 6 HP series Advanced DC motor through a Sevcon controller. Mellisa Downs with the Darmouth Ecovox team explained what caused the ground fault that caused difficulties during pre-race testing. It was in the 12 Volt system, which is not as big a deal as when it is in the traction system, and rewiring the 12 Volt driver's meter so that the grounds were isolated fixed the problem. Mellisa worked on putting the batteries in, installing the ethanol tank, and the fire extinguisher system. Mike Fabio (no relation) is with the Electric Hare built by the Falmouth Wattsmen from Falmouth ME. The first day they milked the car into the finish line because the had trouble charging. Their K&W transformerless charger has very spikey waveforms that kept tripping the circuit breakers. A fix was to lower the charging rate to about 10% of the maximum rate, which leaves them undercharged for the race, and worried. The vehicle is a Volkswagon Rabbit converted with the kit from Electro Automotive, and one that is very neatly done. The 21 kWh batteries are from US Battery, the motor from Advanced DC, and the Controller from Curtis. ((And Mr. Gigi does their hair.)) The conversion is very, very clean and these guys were the hit of Portland ME, showing up on the local TV shouting, "Now we're going to Disney World!" Project e-, the propane fueled hybrid S-10 conversion, had a problem on the first day because the had a valve leak that caused them to run out of fuel, although it did not prevent them from finishing. I had forgotten to ask earlier if, when they added the generator, did they remove any of the batteries. After all, that is one of the motivations for using the engine driven generator; you can get by on fewer batteries. Rachele Batacchi said that they kept all the batteries they had in their non- hybrid version. This proved useful here because they were able to run 16 miles just on the batteries. The team is also plugging in each night, so the fuel is used strictly for range extension. At least a couple of people took the scenic route the first day (read "got lost"). I know that Genesis I missed a turn, and Hopper EV decided to visit Interstate 84, which took him 11 miles out of the way. ((The race generally avoids the interstates, toll roads, and other high-speed roads. The 40 mph minimum speed on such roads precludes many of the solar racers from using them. Hopper EV had no problem there.)) Hopper EV had a more serious problem. For some reason, not well understood, it blew 3(!) chargers at the end of Day 1. The guess was that there was some kind of feedback coming from the controller that was interacting badly with the charger. By disconnecting the controller and rebuilding one of the chargers Tom Hopper was able to get a charge and run the Day 2 leg late, but with no difficulty. Number 53, the Elfa Electra, turned in very good performance. Thomas Faul was expecting a 50 mile range and the first day he managed 69 miles with no problem. Dr. Fred Whitridge is a self-made man. He holds an honorary doctorate that he bestowed upon himself, as a gag "to keep the NESEA people from going too crazy with their bureaucracy and their rules. For example, rule 12.1.6 says you shall carry electrolyte neutralizer at all times. So Dr. Fred and his partner Dr. Rob have been wearing a box of Arm and Hammer baking soda on their arm everywhere they go, figuring they will the only ones left in the race because all the other teams only have their baking soda in the car and will hence be disqualified. When not racing, Fred is an investor in Greenwich CT. Fred's car is number 60, the Millenium Falcon, by the Blue Sky Club, a group from the Yale School of Management class of 1983 that has worked together on a number of projects, some gags, some real that try to address societal concerns such as pollution. The car is a 1985 Volkswagon Cabriolet that at 97,000 miles was blowing a lot of oil. "My 8 year old and I did the conversion, starting with Mike Brown's (Electro Automotive) kit, which has been modified almost beyond recognition." It uses an 8-inch Advanced DC motor, Curtis 1221B ("no problems when mounted on a 2-inch heat sink with a fan"), and a 96 Volt pack of Trojan T145s, with a trailer added just for the race holding an additional 24 Volts. It also has a radio and a heater. The car was finished in May, 1994, and is used for daily commuting. It accumulated 3800 miles in that year. Fred told a story where he went away on business and called home to see how things were going. When he asked his 8 year old what he had been doing, he said, "driving around in the electric car." "You and who?" "Me and Mom." "But Mom doesn't know how to drive the electric car." "I taught her." Number 71 is the S-15 Truck from Minuteman Science-Technology High School in Lexington MA. David Pichulo explained it to me. He worked on the control board and did the fund racing. The conversion is based on the design from Bob Batson of Electric Vehicles of America. The car is actually named "George", but that name never shows up on the standings. They started the car in March when a teacher suggested it as a project. They got a lot of things donated, including the GMC S-15 Sierra from the Conservation Division of Lincoln MA, which will get the EV truck at the end of the race. They finished working on the truck the Saturday before the race and so the 20 Trojan T145 batteries are very new and haven't quite gotten up to full capacity, so they didn't finish the first few days. It weighs 3500 pounds. About 40 people from the shop class worked on it. American Tour de Sol, 1995: Solectria Sunrise I caught James Worden, CEO of Solectria, who is here with the Solectria Sunrise, an all composite purpose built EV. Solectria is also represented by at least a couple of their E-10 pickup trucks (conversions of the Chevy S-10) and no fewer than 4 Forces (conversions of the Geo Metro and Metro LSI). I asked him what the state of the Universal Motor Controller (UMoC, pronounced "You-Mock"). He announced this all-software controlled controller design a couple of years ago, and I have been asking where it was in its development every time I run into him or any of the engineers from Solectria. As it turns out, the first beta version has shown up here at the American Tour de Sol (ATdS) in Tom Hopper's "Hopper EV", number 94. Tom swapped out the brushless DC motor and controller and has installed the UMoC and an AC induction motor. James says that Tom wants to eventually go back to the brushless DC motor, but when he does, he will be able to simple reprogram an Erasable Programmable Memory (EPROM) through the serial port on the controller. In fact, that is the "universal" part of the UMoC. The idea is that the operational logic for controllers for all sorts of motors (brushed DC, brushless DC, AC induction) for all sorts of power ranges could be built in a single, mass produced (and hence inexpensive) logic unit which would be attached to a power unit suitable to the task at hand (low, medium, high power; single or multi-phase). James expects that the Solectria trucks will have the UMoC by the end of the year. He also expects it to be for sale to the EV conversion market in the fall. The Sunrise is the all composite vehicle that Solectria announced at EVS-12 last December. The car is bright yellow with a tan "skirt" around the bottom fifth of the body. It is a very rounded and very smooth 2 door, 4 passenger car that weighs 1694 pounds; gross weight capacity is 2376 pounds giving a 682 pound payload. It has one 42 kW nominal/50 kW peak AC induction motor and front wheel drive. It has the Ovonic nickel metal hydride battery and James says that their goal is to break 200 miles per charge during the race. ((They in fact did that on Thursday with 228.1 miles on a charge. That is the NESEA number from Friday morning's data sheet. James was saying that it was 238. Both maybe right if James drove farther after the official lap was completed, but the NESEA number most likely to be quoted since it was refereed.)) I had heard that even the springs were composite, but that is not the case. "We haven't gone to the very extremes," says James, "but we are trying to take weight out as practically as possible without going to too many high cost methods." They already had a pretty light drive train, but managed to shave some more weight off it. The body is a mix of all different composites and plastics, some aluminum and a tiny, tiny bit of steel. One of the tricks for keeping weight down is to make parts serve two and three purposes. So a fender may also serve as insulation and as an interior panel. The goal is to build a comfortable four passenger vehicle with very high efficiency. The people who are interested in making this happen like Boston Edison, the Northeast Alternative Vehicle Consortium (NAVC), and ARPA think that a tiny car is not going to be as salable as mid-sized or full-sized car, which the Sunrise is. The vehicle in the race is a prototype to learn if these things can actually be done and made to work. As such, there are some peculiarities in this car that would not exist when it is done for real. For instance, the roof has simulated solar cells on it, although a solar panel sits on the rear deck under the rear window and powers an air circulating fan. The door windows do not roll down, so air conditioning is absolutely a must. The Hughes MagnaCharge paddle socket was not yet in place (under the license plate in the rear, although the 110 VAC and the 220 VAC charging plugs were. ((I understand that the Sunrise is actually being charged using the MagnaCharge system, but obviously not in the final configuration. The MagnaCharge people have been following us throughout the race.)) The body appears seamless, with the only lines being those around the small hood, the small trunk lid, and the rather large doors. There are no strips of chrome to hide the fact that two body panels are mating. It is actually made of several pieces, but "the goal is to keep the part count down because that keeps the joints and the weight down and hopefully makes it simple to build as opposed to making millions of parts cheap and having it expensive to build." "Steel is good, it has been proven to be safe, even in electric vehicles, but these materials can get better safety with considerably less weight." The Sunrise is using the same control system as was in the Solectria Force. The drive train was developed for this project, but it is now being put in the new Force cars. A lot of work went into making the interior very quiet ((I suspect because you don't have the engine noise to mask all the other noises sources)) and also into making the doors work exactly right. The doors "slam" differently from most cars, because they are so much less massive. But they mate to the door opening perfectly and latch with the slightest pressure. James indicated that it took a lot of work to get that just right, but of course it is absolutely essential to give a quality look and feel to the car. Looking under the hood is almost disappointing. Things are so uncluttered and simple it doesn't look complicated. ((Of course that is good, but it is so much easier to be impressed by all the stuff under the hood of a high-power car.)) The usual Solectria controller is there, the usual looking Solectria motor, although with a special dual shock dampener that isolates drive train vibration from the body, and the other few support components such as the power brake pump and the DC-DC converter for the 12 Volt loads. All the traction batteries are in a tunnel that runs down the center of the car and between the left and right passengers. A cooling fan forces air down the tunnel when the batteries get warm, and turns off automatically when they cool. I tried to draw a comparison between this and the GM Impact. James immediately said, "no. This is a much bigger car." The aerodynamic shapes are similar, but the fact that the Impact is 2 passenger and the Sunrise is 4 puts them in very different classes. There is no separate bumper, but James said that the car will meet the Department of Transportation tests, including the 5 mph bumper where no damage that costs money can be inflicted. The second Sunrise is being built now and it will be crash tested this summer. The third will be built as refined prototype based on what is learned from the first two. James made very clear that he was indebted to his sponsors. Boston Edison, NAVC and ARPA. Their interest in this and other related projects, such as earlier drive train projects, accelerated this work considerably. Nick Karditsas is from Ovonic, the company that provided the Nickel Metal Hydride batteries in the Sunrise. It is an advanced battery for EVs, developed under funding of the United States Advanced Battery Consortium. Nickel Metal Hydride batteries have an energy density of about 75 Watt-hours per kilogram, as compared to 25 Wh/kg for lead acid batteries. The Sunrise has a 25 kWh pack composed of 18 10-cell, 12 Volt, 120 Amp-hour modules in a single 216 Volt string. Beyond that, the power train is the usual Solectria AC induction motor system. The charger uses the Hughes MagnaCharge inductive coupler system. An unusual aspect of NiMH batteries is that the discharge chemistry is actually slightly endothermic; the chemistry actually > cools < the battery as it discharges. According to Nick, the effect is apparent at a C/6 (20 Ampere) rate. American Tour de Sol, 1995: Rob Wills Dr. Robert Wills is the technical director of the American Tour de Sol. He has overall responsibility for the technical rules that the cars must meet and the inspection process that verifies their compliance. But Rob is also heavily involved in the electrical usage measurements being taken as the plugged-in vehicles charge every night. I posted earlier about the NESEA Energy Challenge tests, where they are collecting data to compare how far a vehicle goes when a gallon of oil taken from the ground is used to power a gasoline vehicle and when a gallon of oil is used to power an electric vehicle. Rob mentioned that they are also looking at the energy usage through the night. The assumption that electric vehicles will charge at night is a good one, but if the vehicle is plugged in the moment it gets home, it will draw it's heaviest load early in the evening and tapper off over the night. And if that's you and me and the girl next door all coming home in our EVs, then that presents a significant early evening load. So, they should get some very interesting data on kiloWatt-hours used for charging, measured every 15 minutes, for 50 cars at once, as part of the oil-well-to-wheels research. Rob spoke at length about the Power Quality measurements. Years ago when the loads on electric transmission systems were mostly motors, light bulbs, and resistive heaters ((that is mostly inductive and resistive loads)) the power drawn from the grid had the same shape ((waveform)) as the voltage from the grid; both were sinusoidal. And the current was pretty much in phase with the voltage, that is it had a `good power factor'. ((When the power factor is `good', a Watt measured with a Watt-meter, which essentially multiplies instantaneous voltage times instantaneous current, represents the amount of energy that is actually being delivered by the grid to the load. When the power factor is bad, the current leads or lags the voltage, and the Watt-meter doesn't reflect the amount of energy being delivered.)) You still have the same amount of current, the same amount of heating in the wires, and the same losses from the current, but the electric company cannot collect money for it. It is then called `reactive power' or `imaginary power'. The common fixes were applied at the power plant or by putting capacitors on the lines of the substations. Life in recent years has gotten more complicated. In large office buildings up to 30% of the loads can be the plug-loads of computers and such which only take their energy at the peak of the voltage waveform. So, instead of having a sinusoidal current waveform, you have something that looks like a little bump and that only happens for a part of the cycle. Those current bumps, because they are not pure sine waves, have lots of harmonics, mostly at 3 and 5 times the voltage frequency, which is 180 and 300 Hertz ((in power systems that operate at 60 Hz)). Transformers have higher losses at higher frequencies, so it is necessary to derate transformers designed for pure sinusoidal loads when they are faced with these spikey loads. What's this got to do with EVs? Well, we were seeing chargers popping 20 Amp circuit breakers when the normal, average current reading meters said they were only drawing 15 Amps. But with a special true RMS current meter, which gives the equivalent heating value of the current, we were seeing 25 Amps. And the waveforms involved were very, very spikey with a sharp current peak at the most positive and most negative parts of each voltage cycle; probably only 15 degrees of conduction in each 180 degree portion of the cycle. Electric utilities are concerned about this not only because it can cause overheating, but it can also cause distortion in the voltage waveform that can cause problems in other equipment on the same circuit, as far back as the step-down transformer on the pole!. Another related problem is caused by the 3-phase power distribution systems used by utilities. In a wye-wired system, if the loads on the 3 legs of the distribution power was equal, the current in the neutral would be zero. Because of this effect, systems were commonly designed with the neutral leg undersized by about 20%, to save the expense of copper that "never would be used"; a practice allowable by the electrical code. Many old buildings are wired that way. But when people started using lots and lots of computers the neutral started to get overloaded and hot! The reason is that while the first harmonic waveforms, the 60 Hz waveforms, add to zero in the neutral when the loads are in balance, the third harmonic waveforms sum additively creating 3 times the original current in the neutral leg. So new power system practices in buildings require the neutral conductor to be larger than the phase conductors, and power transformers now come in harmonic or non-linear ratings to accommodate the extra neutral conductor load. While simple battery chargers may cause the same problem as computers, it doesn't have to be so. The traditional fix is to use ferro-resonant transformer. An additional winding on the transformer is used to control the spikes and produces a rather triangular current waveform. Modern power supplies and battery chargers now use high frequency Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) techniques that can align their current waveforms to the voltage waveforms and are called "power factor correcting power supplies." So, during the overnight charging of the cars in the race, there will be a harmonic analyzer, made by Basic Measuring Instruments (BMI) from California (Sunnyvale?), looking at the entire charging station. They will collect data on overall power, power factor, and harmonic spectrum of each phase of the main feed at hourly intervals, and also watch how the voltage on the feed changes as they bring on individual car chargers. During the race they will also measure every individual charger and capture its harmonic spectrum. There is a wide variety of chargers here, from Solectria's which are pretty well power factor corrected, to a number of old ferro-resonant chargers, to some that are straight rectifier chargers, to some that are SCR controlled and phase-angle controlled that can have poor power factor but still have reasonable waveform. The biggest part of the problem is the spikey waveform, because that is what causes transformer and neutral overheating. There is a UL/IEEE standard, number 519, that says that you shall not have more than 5% harmonic distortion which means 95% of the current going into a load must be in-phase, fundamental current. A couple of good sources of articles on these topics are the magazines called "The Electrical Inspector's Journal" and also "Electrical Apparatus" which has great articles by Richard Nailen. I asked Rob which cars had caught his attention (before the race had actually started). He said the 3 hybrids where very interesting, because he wanted to see how they did in the NESEA Energy Challenge. Hybrid design is not simple, but we are already hearing 80-to-90 miles per gallon numbers from other races. Until the `silver bullet' battery appears on the market, hybrids may well be the path to the future. American Tour de Sol, 1995: More interviews John Duffy, from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, provided some additional information about the electric bus that drove in the race. "The reason we left Waterbury a day early is that we had a commitment to Mass Electric to provide shuttle service in Northampton starting at 12:30 on Monday. With the bus we had to change batteries on route once a day, except on Wednesday when someone apparently shut off one of our chargers during the night and we got only partial charge; we had to change battery packs twice. Changing packs on the road takes about an hour and fifteen minutes! "On the last day (Friday) we got permission from Nancy and Rob to leave early so that we could arrive in time to be on display and to meet with our tow truck to go back to Lowell. We left Dover at 7:55 am and arrived within three miles of the finish line at 10:45 am. We did not to have change battery packs, much to our delight, and we achieved our own record range of over 62 miles on one charge (with some capacity to spare)!! We waited for one hour just outside of Portland until most of the other cars passed so that we would not upstage anyone. We arrived at the finish line at about noon. "We are quite proud of the bus performance. We did not set any speed records; however, if you estimate the energy efficiency in seat-mile per kWh, I'm sure we did quite well." Number 98, the Solar Flyer, burned out a controller about 25 miles from the finished line on Wednesday. They took the controller to the guy at University of Massachusetts in Lowell who built it, at about midnight. He worked on it all night and they put it back in the car. They were not ready at start time on Thursday, but there are rules that allow them to start themselves late, with a penalty, so they did. Unfortunately, luck was not with them. Thirty- some miles down the road, the motor burned out. So when I found them they were swapping that motor for another that was less efficient but had more power. They expected to start Friday morning. However, on Friday morning, while trying to inflate a tire, the pump broke and the tire went flat, just before the race started. Vickie Kheifets said they were going get it fixed and start themselves again. And in fact they made it all the way to Portland ME. Jerry McAlwee had Wild Cherry on display on Thursday evening, even though his motor was burned out, hoping to get a few points for being on display and still hoping that a motor might show up the next morning from a friend at Columbia University. Ted Bohn and the 1958 Berkley, number 79, showed up on Thursday evening to join the race, late and with a pile of penalties, in the Discover Channel Commuter category. This is the second entry by Team New England; the other is number 28. A Berkley is a > tiny < two seat sports car, just 10 feet 3 inches long, with a alloy-reinforced glassfibre tub bonded to a steel chassis. The conversion runs on 13 12-Volt Delco-Remy Electric Vehicle batteries, the same as used in the GM Impact. ((These are pretty big units, and where they hid 13 of them in that little, little car, I could not figure out.)) The drive system is a Solectria AC Induction 28 HP peak motor and controller. Total weight after conversion, from an info sheet: 1,100 pounds. And they guess they have over 100 mile range, and an efficiency of 9 miles per kiloWatt-hour. Ted also said their goal was "to come in dead last, but finished." Helios the Heron turned in a "personal best" of 16 miles on Thursday, before they ran out of battery. Quite a feat for a this car built by elementary school kids. Steve Ryan from New Hampshire Technical Institute told me that Suntech, #84, suffered a major motor failure that they could not repair in the field. This is a huge disappointment, since the Suntech has raced in every one of the seven American Tour de Sol races. The brushless DC motor shattered its sensing wheel. With out it, the controller cannot sense the shaft position of the rotor and thus cannot control the 3-phase inputs that rotate the magnetic field that turns the motor. Tom Hopper, who is an advisor to the NHTI team, was particularly disappointed about Suntech not finishing, because they had "the most exquisite photovoltaic wing I have ever seen. It does an exceptionally good job of taking the heat away from the photovoltaic cells." The mounting surface is an honeycomb core sheet that is made entirely of aluminum. The photo cells are mounted intimately with the top sheet. The heat is very quickly conducted away from the cells, through the walls of the honeycomb, to the inner sheet. The inner sheet is within the hollow interior of the wing. When underway, air flows in the leading edge and out the trailing edge of the wing. When the vehicle is stationary, the wing is raised to face the sun, leading edge up. In that position, the wing acts as a chimney, carrying heat up the interior cavity and out the top. Cooling the cells in this way when they are under intense solar heating load improves their effectiveness at turning sunlight into electricity. In addition to providing this heat conduction, the aluminum honeycomb is very stiff, which provides excellent mechanical support for the solar cells, which are essentially glass and hence very fragile. Mach .05 also had problems Friday morning. While torquing down the bolts for the front wheel, one of the bolts broke off. Again, they were not ready when the race started, so they fixed the problem and started themselves late. On the way to Portland, they ran over a stone in the highway that flattened a tire, that they had to stop and change. I don't have the numbers yet, but the Nordic Challenger, #7, won the US Department of Energy daily efficiency award in the Production category on each of the 5 days of the race. Solar Flair I, number 68, had disappeared after the first day of the race, but I didn't hear why until Friday. Nancy Hazard, director of the ATdS, explained that they in fact planned to drop out after one day. They have a couple new projects and just could not afford the time and commitment for the whole race. But, since the start was in Connecticut and that is their home state, they wanted to be there at the start. ((It's good to know it wasn't due to any type of mishap.)) Sparky, #81, pleased its team, Wooster's Charge. The hills did not hurt it nearly as much as they feared and they always seemed to have a lot of charge left over. They were particularly pleased when the drove 100 miles one day and still had some juice left. John Dudek, advisor to RHAM Rod, and Roger Titus, advisor to Solar Bolt, got into a interesting discussion in my presence. Both are 120 Volt systems, based on Trojan T145s. RHAM Rod has been using BATT juice, and John is quite pleased. "But when you use BATT juice, you have to make sure you drive the car on a regular basis." When they first took it out in the spring, after sitting for about 4 months, the first charge gave them 12 kWh. The next gave the 14 kWh. Then 16 kWh. Every charge seemed to add 2 kWh more. During the race, with half juiced batteries and half not, RHAM Rod was taking on 30 kWh over night. And when John was using a Lester charger, it was putting out 22 to 23 Amps; after BATT juice, it put out 32 Amps. ((BATT claims that juiced batteries have lower internal resistance, which would explain this.)) ERANGE, #49, did very well during the race. The worse problem seemed to be that when it drove past some of the photographers, they didn't get any shots, so the press asked the team to go back and drive by again, but slower. "Other than that we had nothing to do but charging the batteries and driving," said Helmut Schiller. Their best range was 85 miles. Ted Bohn told me that Team New England's number 28, TNE II, drove the 58 miles of the last day in just about 1,100 Watt-hours. ((That's 19.0 Watt-hours per mile folks!)) On top of that, number 79, the 1958 Berkley, made its coming- out trip admirably. The driver babied it most of the way, but when it was clear they had enough reserve to easily finish the race, the ran it up to the full legal limit and caught up with and passed TNE II. The Team New England cars came under the finish banner one after the other. Ted said he had 5 first place trophies in autocross racing in Wisconsin, where he raced EVs against and beat gasoline powered cars. "EVs have a lot of power down low. If you can keep the gasoline powered cars from reaching their upper gears you can always beat them. ... EVs have a lot more flexibility and control, because you don't have to match gears coming into corners, you don't have the stability problems in your suspension of loading and unloading and oversteer and understeer depending on where your throttle is. It's just like driving a video game! A pedal for go and a pedal for stop. [And with the AC induction system] you can dial up the stop as hard as you want and go as hard as you want. You can pull 200 Amps out or push 200 Amps in." ((I didn't get to see the autocross race; I was typing, don't you know. But I understand it's a tight, twisty little course set up on a parking lot.)) "And, it's a short course, so you don't have to worry about range." Number 87, the Spirit of Massachusetts, was proud of the fact that they were the only solar car to go all the way entirely on solar energy. They never charged and they never trailered. In all likelihood, this was its farewell race. U Mass, Lowell is building a whole new vehicle for the Sunrace 1995 which starts in just a couple of weeks. "If you have some money to donate and want your name on the car, call 508-934-3061," said Steve Garison. Laurel Zeno, advisor to the Mach .05 team, had an interesting story to tell. Just outside of Portland, ME, a citizen became very irate at the race car for pulling up to the light at 25 miles per hour, and blasted her horn continuously while the car was stopped at the red light. When the light turned green, Mach .05 pulled through the light and then to the side of the road to let the traffic get by. The irate citizen stopped in the center of the highway, got out, and demanded to make a citizen's arrest of the driver for obstructing traffic. The Mach .05 driver tried to explain about the ATdS race, but she didn't want to hear about all that and demanded his driver's license. Laurel got involved in the conversation at this point, cleared the team to continue, explained that she was the team leader and would speak for them. It took a bit of explaining, and referring to the various ATdS documents (driver's manual, race program, signs posted along the route that help the cars stay on course, etc.), and exchanging of license information. She then told her to "please visit Portland, and the Solar Blast, and learn all about alternative energy. And have a good day on behalf of the Mach .05 team." James Moore, a junior at Ottawa Hills High and shop team coordinator, gave me a wrap up on Ottawa Orange III. The big problem proved to be that the solar array broke and produced 2 Amps, instead of the 5 Amps they were expecting. So they had to take the penalty of charging the batteries by plugging in the last two days. Mechanically, the vehicle held up very well. James explained the dedication to Dwakeely S. McMillan on the flyer the Ottawa team has been handing out. Dwakeely (pronounced "DO-wah-key-lee") was with the team and helped put the car together last year. He was murdered on March 12, 1995. James said they planned to return again next year for the New York City to Washington DC ATdS. Eaven Horter with the Salisbury School's Photon, number 85, was very pleased with the performance of their vehicle. Unfortunately, their driver made a 12 mile detour that caused them to run out of energy. Their only mechanical problem was a dented wheel, but they fixed it. They are hoping to do a commuter car. They are trying to raise money so they can buy a "Splash" body and frame from a company in Florida and install their own drive system. The Ford Ecostar, which was run by Northeast Utilities, did 183 miles on a charge on Thursday, which is a few more than last year. It, and all the production category vehicles, had no problems during the race, demonstrating a main theme of this event, EVs are here today and can be at least as reliable as ICE machines. American Tour de Sol, 1995; more interviews (long) ((These interviews come from Day 3, Keene NH to Lexington MA, because I skipped them so I could post race results.)) Most interesting glimpse of the future department: Nancy Hazard told me of a conversation she had with Gary Carr. He was of the opinion that a 4-wheel drive car, with independent electric drive of each wheel under computer control, could be programmed in such a way that you could not loose traction, spinout, or skid. It would be inherently safe, lots of fun to drive and cheap to build as an electric vehicle. By comparison, the problems of trying to provide variable drive ratios from a single engine through mechanical transmissions and differentials in current all-wheel drive vehicles cause explosive complexity. Jay Tarler, who was one of the keepers of the charging trailer and responsible for having adequate power, told me that overall the exercise of reconnecting the trailer at each evening's stop had been going very well. They were not taxing the equipment, drawing a bit more than half its capacity at peak early each night. The main problems seemed to be with a few of the car chargers. Maybe 3 or 4 chargers each night had a problem kicking out a breaker. One night they did have a problem where a car was plugged into the wrong sized breaker. Bob Goodrich was responsible for the charging energy and power harmonics data collection. All the Watt-hour meters are bussed together on a network and their individual numbers are downloaded into a datalogger. The charging energy data collection was going slower than they expected, but they were getting good data on the harmonics, both for individual chargers and the overall effect. During the race, he said he did not have any feel for what the data would be telling them. That would all happen after the race was done and they could look at everything carefully. Angelo Esposito explained that his car, Fulmine, number 69, is an Italian name for lightning. During the middle of the race, he had problems getting a full charge, because his charger gave up. Solectria lent him one until he was able to fix his own. Robin Shaffer-Sebastian is parent of Daren Shaffer who is with number 98, the Solar Flyer. She is very proud of her son's class' accomplishments. Daren is a 16 year junior at the Framingham MA High School. He attended the 1988 ATdS and from then on had a dream of entering. But in 1990 he was diagnosed with ALS Lukemia, and spent 2 years on chemotherapy. Happily, his cancer has now been in remision for almost 4 and a half years. His health problems focused his attention on issues of the environment and pollution and he is now the vice-president of the school's Environmental Club. Last summer he was on a tour at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and met Professor Allen Rux, who spoke about their solar racing program. Through Professor Rux, Daren and his classmates, 2 girls and 10 boys, were able to get a vehicle that raced in last year's ATdS ((which my records show was number 56, Patriot, from Shaftsbury CT)). They formed a club, reworked the car, repainted and renamed it, and brought it to the race, thus fulfilling Daren's dream. Allaire Paterson is with WE'RE IT (Women's Electric Racing Education International Team) which came to race the Wild Cherry, based on the Yamaha XA-125 scooter, although it is now over 6 feet long, making it sort of a cross-country scooter. The 36 Volt, 3.4 kWh system is made from Electosource Horizon batteries. Wild Cherry is the brain-child of Jerry McAlwee, a field test engineer for Electrosource, who also has his own company called Empyreum, Inc. More info: (512) 707-1088 Jerry explained that he did some analysis of what electric vehicles make sense with the battery-to-vehicle mass ratio of lead-acid technology. He determined that only a scooter or a bus can be marketed today and meet the expectations of the customer. He was also looking for an daily vehicle for himself, and also a test platform for chargers, controllers and other systems needed to run advanced lead-acid batteries, such as the Horizon. He put the Wild Cherry together in about 3 and a half weeks to prove to himself that the ideas work. He found a charger that will charge each battery separately so that each is treated optimally. Because the Horizon has a purer lead component, it is less prone to gassing, but you want to be very careful that the amount of overcharge is matched to the individual battery's needs, and no more. He uses a Lynch Brushed Permanent Magnet motor, made in England, (the same motor architecture as used by ERANGE), with 7 times the magnetic flux density as a series wound motor. The result is about 1 horsepower/pound, 3 times the power-to-weight of an Advanced DC or GE motor. It is driven by a DAX-B Series 400 Amp controller. The driving circuits for the Mosfet go up to 20 kHz. With such a short ramp-time for the switching, the efficiency is greatly increased. The first day they ran, Day 2, they ran on 24 Volts, so some of the hills gave them some problems. On Day 3, they were looking for a 100 mile range (which they did not make, because of their motor burned out). Now, Electrosource is in Austin TX, and Allaire is from California. How did they get connected on this? "WE'RE IT raced in Phoenix in March in Clare Bell's 914 Porche "Chili Pepper" using Horizons. We wanted to come to the ATdS this year." Allaire arranged to be a driver of Jerry's vehicle, and Marianne Walpert, co-founder of WE'RE IT, is driving Team New England II. WE'RE IT info: (415) 637-0665, or (213) 669-1461 At the Symonds Elementary School, in Keene NH, I saw a ATdS first. It started very modestly. The first I met was one David Harris, a pupil at the school. He was asking the car drivers for their autographs. Before very long, it seemed all the kids were collecting autographs, on books, and especially on Frisbees that the Ford Ecostar people were handing out. By the time we were ready to restart, there were kids with 30 or more signatures. ((And who knows. In 30, or 40, or 50, or 60 years they may be worth something!)) Rod Tocci was driving one of the support vehicles for New Hampshire Technical Institute's 3 vehicles, and told me about the Suntech, number 84, solar racer. The Suntech team was 5 freshmen this year. The 72 Volt system is charged by a 360 Watt (measured) solar panel, driving a Solectria brushless DC drive system with the electronic 2-speed transmission. This vehicle has been in every one of the 7 American Tour de Sol races. This year they installed two new peak- power trackers for the solar array, were experimenting with higher pressure in the tires, changed the front-end geometry to decrease bump-steering on corners to improve stability and safety on the road, and dimensional changes to some of the chassis components. On a good day, it can get up to 65 miles/hour; on a downhill, 75. Suntech had no trouble coming over the steep hills on the Day 2 course. Daniel Allard was the driver for Suntech. He added that the wing that supports the solar panel was redesigned to be hollow for better cooling. ((Tom Hopper explained that in more detail in an earlier posting.)) Jack Briggs from Public Service of New Hampshire was tending the Ford Ecostar, number 55, is one of two leased for the past 6 months by Northeast Utilities, out of Burlington CT. They decided to enter the ATdS because the route went through three of their service territories, in CT, MA, and NH. They use the vehicle daily for education programs in CT. Public Service of NH has a Dodge Caravan TEVan that also they use as a courier vehicle. They have had no serious problems, and Ford has been right there to deal the minor issues caused by power harmonics and plugs. The main reason they came to the ATdS was for education purposes, especially the young people. "They are of the age that are going to turn around and wake up and go `We don't want gasoline powered vehicles ... we want something that is less pollution.'" The vehicle uses a 56 kW (75 HP) air cooled AC induction motor, driving the wheels without a transmission. It weighs 4080 pounds, with a 880-1020 payload capacity. Top speed is 70 mph; 0-50 mph in 12 seconds. The battery is 33 kWh, charged by a 240 VAC, single phase charger that takes 7 hours if the battery is fully discharged. The energy use is 3 miles per kiloWatt-hour. RHAM Rod did a personal best for efficiency: 228 Watts/mile. RHAM Rod, and several other cars had a clear plastic cover that covered the entire hood area when the hood was up for display, which struck me as a very sensible precaution against probing fingers. Some were just dropped in place when the hood was opened, others were permanently installed and had to be removed to work on the car, but either way it made it much harder for the uneducated to hurt the vehicle or themselves, especially when there are hordes of people swarming around the car. ((In fact, it occurs to me that it might be a reasonable race requirement when the cars on display. It just takes one accident, even a minor one, ...)) NOTE: I got this pair of stories confused earlier. Number 61, Solar Bolt, had battery problems, where they had to swap out come units, but it has not kept them from completing each leg of the race. Number 76, RHAM Rod, blew a motor by overrevving it going down a hill. It locked up solid, leaving 30 feet rubber on the road. Bob Batson of Electric Vehicles of America provided a replacement, and Minuteman Science and Technology School provided the shop space and they were able to swap the motors and put RHAM Rod back in the race. Cornell's Tempest, number 3, once they got their rear gear box back together and the rear motor back on line, said they climbed all those hills with no problem whatsoever. They didn't have any miles/gallon numbers for me. Jane Cooper with number 74, Lighning Volt, was happy with their progress. At the end of Day 3, they washed the car, which caused it to rain from 7 pm until about 5 am. ((The only rain we saw during the race.)) Ecovox had a problem with their generator set, that required that they clean out the starter motor and reconnect the stater switch. They were up until 3 in the morning, inside their trailer, working by flashlight. The ZeeVee88 set a "personal best" distance record of 51.2 miles. The Electric Fiero had an intersting feature that I happened to notice. In the motor compartment, which is in the rear, there is a 250 Amp DC Albright/Heinemann(sp?) circuit breaker, with a solenoid positioned so that, if energized, it would hit the breaker's handle and kick it off. "So, what activates that solenoid?" I asked Michael Orr. "It's on the key switch, on the starter position." Thus it serves two purposes. First, it's an emergency cutout, and second, if someone gets in the car, and doesn't know what they are doing, the first thing they are likely to do is disable the car. Number 28 is the Team New England II, and I spoke with Olaf Bleck. This car ran last year and collect an efficiency prize with 21 Watt-hours/mile. This year, they ran with the Deka Dominator sealed lead-acid batteries, repaired the suspension that broke last year, repainted it, and mounted solar cells (leftover for the Australian race and a little worse for wear) permanently to the car. ((I'm used to thinking of solar cells as blue, but when they get old, they turn a pale brown.)) The car is a little lighter than last year. They had some stability problems Day 1 at about 11 miles; while on a level stretch, "the car got sideways." They fixed the stability by taking out some batteries, and put it back in the race. The team is now working on Team New England III for the Sunrayce in June, which will be slightly larger, more elegant, and slightly lighter. And their next project is a 2-passenger car for a race ((I had not heard of)) which will go from Washington DC to Los Angeles in the summer of 1996, which should get 600 miles per charge. ((A Dan Eberley(sp?) is running the race; anyone out there have info?.)) The route passes through Indianapolis, Tulsa, and Pheonix in 4 stages. The cars will be allowed to run all day and night, charge off the grid whenever they please, but if they don't make it to the next stop by a certain time, they have to trailer in for the next restart. David Dultz(sp?), of Boston Edison, is on of the sponsors of the Sunrise. He was looking forward to getting the vehicle after the ATdS. Boston Edison plans to use it as a marketing tool. In addition, as part of their funding contract, they have rights to market the Sunrise in New England and world wide. Bill Walsh is with the Bailey Corporation, a manufacturer of exterior automobile components in Seabrook NH. He brought a 1913 Bailey Electric, which is legal to drive down the road. It is entirely original, has a range of 100 miles at 20 miles per hour. "It is at least 4000 pounds." It has climbed Mt Washington, driven to Boston, New York and Chicago. There are no gears, but a 6 position rheostat provides forward and reverse speeds. The car was built as a joint effort between Thomas Edison and Col. Bailey, but never went into production. He trailered the car to Exeter NH for display there, > drove < it to Dover NH in about 1 and a half hours and displayed it there. It sports an original, electro-mechanical Ampere-hour meter, that runs one direction when charging and another during discharge. American Tour de Sol, 1995; race results ((While taken from NESEA data sheets, this is a bit simplified form of the race results. There are a number of different subcategories, such as those that separate basic lead-acid batteries from advanced batteries. I expect to get a much clearer form of the final results from NESEA later. Also, see my notes below.)) Rank is position within the CATEGORY, based on Miles. Overall is overall standing, across all CATEGORIES, based on Miles. Number is the vehicle number. Miles is called Pole Miles on the sheet this is taken from, and (I believe) Tour Miles on earlier sheets. It is the adjusted overall score, summing up starting banner-to-finishing banner distance, plus extra laps, plus extra credit items, minus penalties. Award is the cash component of the NESEA prize. It also includes display space at and pre-paid registrations to the Sustainable Transportation/Solar and Electric Vehicle conference this fall in Providence RI. CATEGORY Rank Overall Number Vehicle Name Miles Award sub-category PRODUCTION 1 2 56 Solectria GT/VA Power 538.7 sedan/adv energy store 2 3 55 Ford Ecostar 519.7 utility/ adv energy store 3 6 7 Nordic Challenger 454.9 sedan/lead-acid 4 7 50 Solectria/Horizon Bat 438.8 5 9 51 '95 Solectria Force 415.1 6 10 62 Solectria E-10 389.9 utility/lead-acid 7 12 90 ZAP Powered Rotator 366.4 2-wheel/lead-acid 8 30 54 US Electricar Bus 169.6 mass-transit DISCOVERY CHANNEL COMMUTER 1 1 63 Solectria Sunrise 587.4 $500 sedan/overall 2 5 61 Solar Bolt 480.7 $500 sedan/lead-acid 3 11 66 Genesis I 383.6 4 13 64 Kineticar II 358.1 $500 utility/lead-acid 5 14 78 Sofix Sedan 352.6 6 15 81 Sparky 348.9 7 16 60 Millenium Falcon 336.8 8 17 74 Lightning Volt 315.3 9 18 70 Sun-Bunny 311.3 10 19 72 Sungo 294.6 11 20 80 Brock Electruck 294.4 12 21 53 Elfa Electra (Skoda) EV 227.7 13 25 76 RHAM Rod 239.5 14 27 69 Fulmine 218.0 15 29 65 Electric Hare 213.1 16 32 71 S-15 Truck 133.9 17 34 75 KA1000 64.7 18 41 67 ZeeVee88 -121.1 19 43 73 Electric Fiero -336.1 20 44 79 1959 Berkeley -339.0 21 47 68 Solar Flair I -484.9 TOUR DE SOL RACING 1 28 85 Photon 212.5 $500 2 33 83 Sol Survivor III 71.8 3 35 98 Solar Flyer 11.5 4 40 84 Suntech -117.2 5 42 88 Mach .05 -138.6 CROSS CONTINENTAL SOLAR RACING 1 21 87 Spirit of Massachusetts 251.7 $500 2 37 37 Ottawa Orange III -15.7 HYBRID 1 4 96 Project e- 485.6 $500 2 8 3 Tempest 432.6 3 38 95 Ecovox -22.8 OPEN - 3 or 4 wheels 1 24 92 Sunpacer 247.1 $500 2 26 94 Hopper EV 230.8 3 31 10 Gasoline Control Car 167.8 4 36 28 Team New England II 40.9 5 46 93 Helios the Heron II -412.5 OPEN - 2 wheels 1 22 49 ERANGE 255.7 $500 2 39 89 Envirocycle III -74.7 3 45 91 Wild Cherry -342.7 ((What follow are taken off my audio recordings at the awards ceremony, which were sometimes a bit garbled; hence they are subject to my typos, etc.)) Solectria GT/VA Power won the Perpetual Trophy in the PRODUCTION category. Both Photon and Spirit of Massachusetts will share the Perpetual Trophy for the SOLAR RACING categories; 6 months of display rights at each school. Project e- also got a trophy for Best Overall Hybrid. ERANGE was also awarded the Perpetual Trophy in the OPEN category. The same team, the Schiller Group won last year for CityCat, so the trophy is returning to Germany. Efficiency Awards were presented by the Department of Energy and Arrgone National Labs' Robert Larson. The cash Award is from the DOE. Place Vehicle Award COMMUTER: Students 5th Sun-Bunny $250 4th Lightning Volt $500 3rd Sparky $750 2nd Kineticar II $1000 1st Solar Bolt I $1500 HYBRID: Students 3rd Ecovox 2nd Tempest 1st Project e- $1500 OPEN: Students 1st Sunpacer $1500 The Nordic Challenger won the daily efficiency award in the PRODUCTION category each day. Friday's number was 7.98 miles/kiloWatt-hour. ((This vehicle is part of the EVermont electric vehicle evaluation program, and drove 11,000 miles in the past 10 months.)) The 1959 Berkeley was awarded an efficiency award for getting 9.26 miles/kWh on Friday. Project e- got an efficiency award, ((but I didn't get the number)). Team New England II got an efficiency award for getting 43.48 miles/kWh(!). Highest 1-day efficiencies: Category Vehicle Name miles/kWh PRODUCTION (sedan) Nordic Challenger 9.86 PRODUCTION (utility) Ford Ecostar not available PRODUCTION (2-wheel) ZAP Powered Rotator not available COMMUTER Sungo 10.4 COMMUTER sedan conv Solar Bolt 5.59 HYBRID 1 seat Ecovox 3.25 (including fuel energy) HYBRID 2+ seat Tempest 2.64 (including fuel energy) OPEN 2 wheel ERANGE 23.54 OPEN 3,4 wheel Team New England II 43.48 Mass Transit US Electricar Bus 2.86 Highest efficiency, entire race: COMMUTER Sungo 9.5 Longest Range, 1 day, NESEA awards: Category Vehicle Name miles PRODUCTION lead-acid Nordic Challenger 128 tie Solectria/Horizon Bat 128 tie PRODUCTION adv energy Solectria GT/VA Power 175 COMMUTER lead-acid Solar Bolt 143 COMMUTER adv energy Solectria Sunrise 238 HYBRID Project e- 186 OPEN Team New England II 95 Longest Range, 1 day, DOE award: COMMUTER adv energy Solectria Sunrise 238 Michael Beebe and Gary Carr gave a safety award, to recognize the best high- school conversion, to RHAM Rod. The NESEA (oil well to wheel overall energy usage) Challenge: Vehicle type Vehicle Name oil well-to-wheel miles/gallon 2 wheel vehicle ERANGE 245.5 1 passenger car Team New England II 127 2 passenger car Sol Survivor III 90.6 4-6 passenger car Solectria Sunrise 70.7 utility vehicle Ford Ecostar 58.7 hybrid Ecovox 41.0 control car Geo Metro 34.7 (allowing for 20% distribution loss) Rob Wills pointed out that one would expect the ZAP Powered Rotator to win the 2 wheel category, especially given they were not measuring the energy that Myhee, the cyclist, was consuming as food. But, ZAP only got 242.7 m/g because their charger was far less efficient than the one used by ERANGE. Rob also pointed out that the heavier hybrids did not do as well as one might expect. Tempest 11.2 Project e- 9.5 ((I expect that Tempest's extra complexity cost them a lot, and the fact that Project e- did not remove any of their lead-acid batteries when they added the propane tank, engine and generator, and also charged from the grid may have given them the worst of both worlds.)) East Penn Manufacturing Co, Lyons Station PA, presented awards to entries that used their Deka line of batteries. 4th Helios the Heron $250 3rd Fulmine $500 2nd Hopper EV $1000 1st Sunpacer $2000 Best, Most Autonomous, Practical Car, NESEA award: Sol Survivor III Nancy Hazard, director of the ATdS, said she would like to create a new category in future ATdSs for "practical, solar-electric, 2-seater, autonomous cars" to compete with Sol Survivor III. Sol Survivor III was recognized as having the most outrageous paint job. ((Hot pink and electric blue.)) Sofix Design was acknowledged as the car with the most batteries and the most electrical connections to trouble-shoot. ((180 nickel-zinc batteries.)) The Old Timer Award to the only car that has been in every ATdS: Suntech The Most Inches Of Ink ((press coverage)): Electric Hare from Falmouth ME The Tough Luck Award: Wild Cherry This scooter came from Austin TX, and had problems that ended with a burned out motor that they were unable to replace. The Best T-Shirt and Strangest Arrest Award: Mach .05 A Maine citizen tried to make a citizen's arrest of Mach .05 for being "illegal in the state of Maine" because it was driving too slowly. The Bullwinkle Award for the Recognition of the Largest Non-Human Life Form Encountered During the American Tour de Sol: Fulmine Angelo Esposito, from Staten Island NY, saw a full-sized moose during the race. ((Welcome to Northern Exposure, Southeast)) Rob Wills commented that it is sometimes too easy to see Solectria as a corporation and separate from the student racing community. But he reminded the audience that it was born in a hole-in-the-wall lab at MIT, and he hoped that, especially the younger people such as the Helios team, would remember that fact. Someday some of them would form their own car companies, or work for a car company, "and help make beautiful cars." (( Personal comments: The Sunrise, a static model just 6 months ago, showed itself to be a very real contender and I think points the way to at least a portion of the future. I suspect I will someday tell folks about when I first saw ... 2 high school projects, Project e-, a hybrid, and Solar Bolt, a lead- acid battery car, are in overall positions 4 and 5, ahead of some of the PRODUCTION cars. The Tempest, a college hybrid, also placed up amidst the PRODUCTION entries. Personal projects, such as Genesis I and Millenium Falcon did very well overall. And Helios the Heron may have come in (almost) dead-last, but the kids were wonderful and I would not be surprised to see some of them go on to do really marvelous things in the future. )) So that's it. I hope you folks have found this as interesting as I did. The American Tour de Sol is a place where you can see Electric Vehicles in a wide variety of forms, on the hoof, dealing with the real world pretty much as we find it. Next year's race is scheduled to go from New York City to Washington DC; contact NESEA for details. I extend my thanks all those who generously gave of their time and thoughts for these interviews, NESEA for their support in this project, and Bill Lord for cross-posting all this stuff to the World Wide Web. ((Roll Credits)) American Tour de Sol, 1995: Final Results Subject to my typos, here is a summary of the final results of the 1995 American Tour de Sol. Mike Bianchi Range Miles: distance traveled without recharging. Effic m/kWh: from battery to wheels. Reported as miles/kiloWatt hour. NEC m/g: NESEA Energy Challenge: "oil well to wheel" expressed in miles/gallon. Calculations include refining fuel, or production and transmission of electricity. Tour Miles: Distance traveled minus penalties for inability to complete course in a timely fashion, and administrative penalties such as speeding, late to meetings, etc. CATEGORY Range Effic NEC Tour Number Vehicle Miles m/kWh m/g Miles PRODUCTION 175 8.10 65.2 539 56 Solectria ForceGT/VA Power 163 na 58.7 520 55 Ford Ecostar 129 9.10 47.4 450 7 Nordic Challenger 129 8.16 57.6 439 50 Solectria/Horizon 102 8.05 42.3 415 51 '95 Solectria Force 111 4.62 23.5 390 62 Solectria E-10 75 na 242.7 366 90 ZAP Powered Rotator 75 2.34 na 170 54 US Electricar Bus DISCOVERY CHANNEL COMMUTER 238 9.30 70.7 587 63 Solectria Sunrise 143 5.59 63 481 61 Solar Bolt 105 4.00 44.0 384 66 Genesis I 89 3.73 45.8 358 64 Kineticar II 104 5.92 43.5 353 78 Sofix Design 97 4.33 41.9 344 81 Sparky 97 3.41 29.3 337 60 Millenium Falcon 76 3.73 na 315 74 Lightning Volt 91 4.66 39.1 311 70 SUN-BUNNY 73 9.58 37.6 295 72 Sungo 81 2.23 21.1 294 80 Brock Electruck 73 4.99 na 258 53 Elfa Electra (Skoda) EV 97 3.95 43 240 76 RHAM Rod 81 4.06 na 221 69 Fulmine 81 5.53 31.8 208 65 Electric Hare 63 na 32.2 134 71 S-15 Truck 69 5.55 73.4 65 75 KA1000 51 5.76 na -121 67 Zee Vee88 59 4.69 na -336 73 Electric Fiero 59 9.26 na -339 79 1959 Berkeley na na na -480 82 Gray Ghost na na na -485 68 Solar Flair I HYBRID 186 0.64 9.5 486 96 Project e- 151 1.24 11.2 433 3 Tempest 73 1.65 41.8 -23 95 Ecovox SOLAR RACING Tour de Sol Racing na 25.3 na 215 85 Photon na na 90.6 69 83 Sol Survivor III na na na 45 98 Solar Flyer na 35.4 na -117 84 Suntech na 22.5 na -139 88 Mach .05 Cross Continental na 28.2 na 254 87 Spirit of Massachusetts na na 44.2 -16 37 Ottowa Orange III OPEN 2-wheel 81 22.8 245.5 256 49 ERANGE 57 12.53 55.3 -75 89 Envirocycle III 57 1.64 na -343 91 Wild Cherry 3-, 4-wheel 73 11.32 89.5 247 92 Sunpacer 73 9.99 57.5 231 94 Hopper EV 95 43.1 126.6 41 28 Team New England II 17 na 11.1 -413 93 Helios the Heron GASOLINE CONTROL VEHICLE na 1.13 35.8 na 10 Gasoline Control Car - - - - The above is copyright Michael H. Bianchi. Permission to copy is granted provided the entire article is presented without modification and this notice remains attached. - - - - Official American Tour de Sol information is available from the sponsor, the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) at 413-774-6051. All media enquiries should be addressed to ... Jack Groh Groh Associates Sustainable Public Relations email: GrohPR@aol.com (401)732-1551 tel (401)732-0547 fax For more great stuff on the American Tour de Sol, check out our home page at http://nesea.nrel.gov which contains route maps, weather conditions, race standings, background pieces and other material. The ATdS Home Page is produced by Bill Lord with facilities donated by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado.